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> Google Docs has been going strong for almost 2 decades I have to disagree here. There have been long stretches of time where it’s appeared to be a mothballed
by JimDabell 3y ago
> Google Docs has been going strong for almost 2 decades
I have to disagree here. There have been long stretches of time where it’s appeared to be a mothballed project with virtually no user-visible changes happening to it.
Here’s the official changelog:
https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9228272 https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9228272
Barely anything happened mid 2019–2021. It looked like a product in maintenance mode for years.
Take July 2019 to July 2020, for instance. In over a year, the only changes of note were: editing headers and footers, an accessibility fix, word count, page numbers, and dark mode on Android. Does that sound like a flagship product from a trillion dollar multinational “going strong”? Or does it sound like a paralysed project with a few interns keeping things ticking over?
And it was worse in the times before that changelog started. That’s hardly “going strong”, that’s surviving on life support. Sure, they never actually killed it and they restarted development once alternatives like Notion started becoming popular, but Google have completely lost interest in Google Docs before and they could do it again – they don’t have the two decade track record you are making them out to have.
- mattzito 3y agoFor whatever its worth, I worked near docs during that time, and that support note elides a lot of the launches that happened. The big focus during that time was on Office compatibility, and so there were a lot of investment in things that were not end-user visible, but allowed for better coexistence in mixed environments. A massive launch in terms of impact and usage was the ability to directly edit word documents in docs instead of converting. This also extended to sheets and slides, and so was a major focus. So - totally agree that there were not a lot of shiny user-facing features during that time, but there was a huge engineering investment going on based on a particular strategy that just didn't show itself sirectly in the UI.
- JimDabell 3y agoFair enough. But from an end-user perspective, I’ve been in multiple conversations where a topic was “can anybody remember the last time Google Docs launched a new feature?” and everybody was completely stumped and nobody could think of a single thing launched in years. When the company in question is Google that’s a very strong signal not to rely on that product being around much longer, which is why the state of Google Docs has been so confusing – clearly lost all momentum yet surprisingly not killed.
- dr_kiszonka 3y agoThe article mentions Google Labs. Do you know if this is an actual team or just an umbrella term for public beta products made by different teams?
- mattzito 3y agoBoth - there is a labs team, and then it gets used as an umbrella term.
- dr_kiszonka 3y agoThanks! It has got to be a lot of fun being in such a team.