13 ms·

I use google docs, and feel like everyone I know professionally in the sfbay tech world does too.

outside1234 13y ago
That's because you are in the startup ecosystem (I'm guessing - which is totally valid) - it is a totally different story once you are talking Enterprise and everything that comes with it (Sarbanes Oxley etc.). It will also be interesting to see how this shifts now that Google is charging everyone to use Google Apps from the get go.
emn13 13y ago
I do get the feeling that this is mostly because it's free however: The UI and feature set are pretty poor, especially compared to office. I sometimes get the impression that the product has just a little bit too much "techdemo" feel. - sure you can collaboratively edit, but not very well: edits to the top of the document will cause repages that make any other editors editing the bottom seesick. There isn't really a good track-changes implementation either - not something you could use to discuss whether changes are good. - You can do some styling, but again it comes across as not really practical for continual extensive use. Word doesn't do a brilliant job of keeping themes/styles consistent throughout the document, but google docs doesn't even try. Just using a different font consistently requires vigilance - there's no defaults you can change. Also, the styling features are really limited in the first place. - Practical tools for writing are sparse. You'd think with their unrivalled big-data text analysis capabilities gdocs would have best-of-the-best spelling/grammar checkers, but they're just basic. The editor view enforces a paged layout, even if you're not writing pages (and when you are, it's not necessarily good for productivity to have it so in your face the whole time). It's html-based, but html export is rudimentary, and css support essentially absent. Frankly, I don't think Gdocs has limited takeup due to poor document interop, I think it has poor takeup because it's just not a very good rich text editor. And it's crucial selling points - always online, cheap, hassle-free synchronization - just aren't that unique anymore, nor executed all that well.
- vidarh 13y ago
  I don't care that it's free - I'd happily pay for a good office suite. But it'd need to run on Linux and OS X. And it'd need to be available remotely. And support collaborative edits. Unlike you I've never run into problems with the collaborative editing. The relative lack of features is not a hindrance for me either, and in some way it's a benefit - less UI clutter. It does certainly lack features, though, and things like the spreadsheet suffers from performance problems (a spreadsheet with more than a couple of hundred rows is total agony), but for me it's still meeting more requirements than Office.

That's because you are in the startup ecosystem (I'm guessing - which is totally valid) - it is a totally different story once you are talking Enterprise and everything that comes with it (Sarbanes Oxley etc.). It will also be interesting to see how this shifts now that Google is charging everyone to use Google Apps from the get go.

emn13 13y ago

I do get the feeling that this is mostly because it's free however: The UI and feature set are pretty poor, especially compared to office. I sometimes get the impression that the product has just a little bit too much "techdemo" feel. - sure you can collaboratively edit, but not very well: edits to the top of the document will cause repages that make any other editors editing the bottom seesick. There isn't really a good track-changes implementation either - not something you could use to discuss whether changes are good. - You can do some styling, but again it comes across as not really practical for continual extensive use. Word doesn't do a brilliant job of keeping themes/styles consistent throughout the document, but google docs doesn't even try. Just using a different font consistently requires vigilance - there's no defaults you can change. Also, the styling features are really limited in the first place. - Practical tools for writing are sparse. You'd think with their unrivalled big-data text analysis capabilities gdocs would have best-of-the-best spelling/grammar checkers, but they're just basic. The editor view enforces a paged layout, even if you're not writing pages (and when you are, it's not necessarily good for productivity to have it so in your face the whole time). It's html-based, but html export is rudimentary, and css support essentially absent. Frankly, I don't think Gdocs has limited takeup due to poor document interop, I think it has poor takeup because it's just not a very good rich text editor. And it's crucial selling points - always online, cheap, hassle-free synchronization - just aren't that unique anymore, nor executed all that well.

vidarh 13y ago
I don't care that it's free - I'd happily pay for a good office suite. But it'd need to run on Linux and OS X. And it'd need to be available remotely. And support collaborative edits. Unlike you I've never run into problems with the collaborative editing. The relative lack of features is not a hindrance for me either, and in some way it's a benefit - less UI clutter. It does certainly lack features, though, and things like the spreadsheet suffers from performance problems (a spreadsheet with more than a couple of hundred rows is total agony), but for me it's still meeting more requirements than Office.