It really feels like they haven't developed the product in the past 10 years. This is the first significant feature change that I can recall in a very long time other than minor UI tweaks.
It’s also frustrating because if Google played to their strengths, Docs could be best-in-class; the real problem that everybody is struggling with is internal knowledge management. Why can’t Google build me a privately indexed knowledge graph of my internal docs, then let me use Google’s search to answer questions? It’s insane that this is not their product strategy for Docs. This should be “easy” to wire up, they have all of the tech already for google.com search.
People like notion because it is easier to structure nested Wiki docs quickly, but you still have the same problems eventually of needing to curate your knowledge base, and things becoming too hard to find past a certain scale.
Instead we get Data Loss Prevention and a bunch of other box-ticking features which, sure, are how you close enterprise deals to displace Microsoft. But I think they are sleeping on their vulnerability to disruption plays from the bottom of the market, and they need to invest more in building a moat here. Make the free/SMB customers delighted, and you starve potential competitors of the oxygen they need to grow into a competitor at the enterprise level.
I do wonder if this is actually building a semantic knowledge graph of the content, vs. just providing a dynamic facade/aggregator for other apps’ search APIs, and doing “old style” text indexing/searching within Workspace services. It looks like the former based on a cursory read of the docs.
It would be more challenging to build a knowledge graph over {drive,slack,Jira,…} documents, but if they just build a knowledge graph within Workspace that could provide more reason to use Docs vs. Notion/Confluence, or Google Chat over Slack. So there is actually a strong product/market reason to build this as a native feature even if you can’t solve it for other apps.
Compared to only the searches being done by a single business and no links in documents
Not easy to do [1]. But that's what we try to to at Dokkument [2]
And also knowledge is spread around different tools, Github, monday, JIRA, Confluence, Slack. It is not all on Google Docs. And is Google is not the most integrated product
> People like notion because it is easier to structure nested Wiki docs quickly
I don't feel like it is the case. You can't retrieve anything unless you know the title of the document or you have saves the URL. Most people don't prefer Notion and some do, because they are list-addicted people, and it is easier to list documents in Notions than in Google Sheet. Notion doesn't fix any knowledge management problems compared to using Google Drive. And Confluence still makes circles around Notion in that area
The problem I think is that, little by little, users start stepping outside the Google bubble and they start to realize that there's clear benefits. I used to be a 100% google person, then we started using dropbox paper for documents, notion for company wiki (and personal notes too), tandem for video calls.
In 2022, our company is using Google only for email, calendar, and sheets. Two years ago we'd be crazy to even think about that. We're up to the point were it wouldn't seem crazy to go with the Microsoft suite, to be honest.
I think for a lot of companies not going with Office is crazy, Google docs isn't good enough, and who's wants to have 7-10 different suppliers for different products (email, calendar, sheets, docs, presentations, wiki, chat, video). Far easer to just buy one cohesive system.
There is probably an opportunity for one of the larger players to acquire the others and move back towards a cohesive platform. There would be push back but I suspect it would pay off. Imagine Airtable, Notion and Slack under one operation.
I'm not sure I'd make that assumtion. Google workplaces makes a lot of revenue. $20/user/month * 100k users in a large company is 24MM/year. I'm sure GCP will grow faster, but Google workplaces has had more market penetration for longer.
But if we look at release notes for the past year, we see a sequence of smaller features.[1] These include ML-driven quick replies for comments, being easily add smart links to people/docs/lists, being able to add image watermarks, and Japanese grammar suggestions. These announcements are in small blog posts [2], and are usually covered by the tech media [3] (largely summaries with a bit of flavor or - cheekily - instructions on how to turn features off). It is hard to feel like there's major progress in Google Docs when features, even useful ones, trickle out like this. Perhaps the big release every year model isn't that bad, for communication purposes. It's just not in the DNA of Google or any online service, however.
If you look at the roadmap for Google Workspace, it's very much about collaboration.[4] This plays to the brand and strength of the online-first vision of Google Apps - it's easy to jump in and collaborate on docs, the suite works well together. I think companies that choose Google Workspace do so to transform the way they work. It's not really about just replicating the Microsoft experience on the web.
That said, I think Microsoft has done an amazing job pulling their apps to the web and adding collaboration/sync. Their online version of Word has basically no caveats, and their realtime editing is even better than Google Docs in some edge cases. So its unclear which way the market will go. Perhaps Microsoft has effectively fended off the online-first threat and can use its inertia and muscle to keep Office at the top. In any case, we'll move to a more heterogenous world where many suites or even individual tools are viable businesses.
[1]: https://support.google.com/a/table/7314896?hl=en
[2]: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/10/easily-add-t...
[3]: https://9to5google.com/2021/10/20/google-docs-menu/
[4]: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/the-future-...
Disclaimer: I work at Google and used to work in the division that develops Google Docs. These are all my opinions.