Unrelated: does anybody remember Google Wave that was supposed to replace the Gmail experience?
A few years ago I was invited to a (pre-release, I think) focus group at Dropbox headquarters on their Dropbox Paper project. We went around the room, speed-dating like, to different tables, where PMs and/or engineers showed us particular UIs or use-cases and asked for feedback. At every table I told them that "this looks a lot like Google Wave", and was met with blank looks.
There are downsides to the tech industry's extreme youthfulness.
Every engineer and PM (there was only one) I knew on the team was aware of the origins of the Paper codebase and the connections to Wave, since it was a fork of Hackpad (acquired by Dropbox) which in turn was a fork of Etherpad (acquired by Google).
What year was this focus group?
I liked Dropbox Paper, and tried to get several projects I "owned" at my company going on it. No one, and I mean no one, else could grok it. We defaulted quickly back to laborious email chains. Grrrr.
It's odd how some tools seem intuitively useful to some kinds of minds / work, and not to others. The Wave / Wave-like interface has an appeal to techies, and was responded to positively by the the theatre professionals with whom I used it in ~2010. Paper was utterly rejected by the biz-dev sorts with whom I work now. I suspect that has something to do with creating something new vs uncritically applying known algorithms. But I don't really know, and that may be an uncharitable analysis.
(...If my memory serves me right)
It had two major issues.
The first one was if you went beyond using it yourself or a very limited collab, it would desync, which was a major deal breaker for something like this. Nothing google with their vast amount of resources couldn't fix though.
The second one was it really was usable for multiple niches. This made it confusing for the general public, and the main audience doesn't even bias towards IT when you are at the scale google operates at.
You could use it as a note taking app yourself that you think might warrant sharing or collaborating later on.
You could use it as a spreadsheet, like how google sheets currently function.
You could use it to replace what we use Slack for these days.
And I really think that a niche or a community would find it useful for one of these and it would become a major tool they'd depend on if google just let it sit around for a while.
Sounds like Teams, but without anyone complaining about having to use it.