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Comment by frade33 | Hacker News Reader

My email to mandy when i signed up:

>It seems awesome. However earlier I had asked, How this is different than Google Docs in terms of 'competition' and features.

Her Response: >The principal difference is that we're focused exclusively on the editorial process, while Google Docs also aims to do a lot of other things. I don't have a feature comparison handy, but you might be interested in this article from FastCo: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672260/editorially-wants-to-red...

Point, I was not convinced, this or any other App of this kind, is going to stand the competition (from Google). Let alone stand out.

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For me the big difference is markdown. I rely so heavily on markdown for writing, and having a native platform where I can drop markdown and have it parsed correctly, and also get feedback/edits from others is huge.

For example, I'm writing a technical book right now. I wanted to write it in markdown for ease of writing and flexibility of output. I also needed reviewers to help me out with editing and checking out the contents. Editorially was a perfect product for me in this place. Maybe the reason they went out though was that it was just too small of a niche. Still makes me sad though : (

iA writer is the best for MarkDown, I am myself an addict to Markdown.

I dunno, Draft is doing quite well as far as I can tell. I'm using it to write a book & maintain a bunch of other writing. A lot of people who have to write constantly care a great deal about the experience of writing, not to mention the specific features. Google Docs is a competitor for Microsoft word, neither offer a pleasant writing experience.

People used to say the same thing about Microsoft and Office.

Yeah but Microsoft Office had a clear attack vector: it cost a significant amount of money and you could "beat" it for some (but not nearly all) people by being "good enough" and free.

Google Docs is free (yeah, you're "Google's product" yadda, yadda, but hardly anyone cares about that, they just know they aren't paying for it) which makes it much harder to attack unless your product is substantially and demonstrably better than it in at least some very important areas.

To some degree, it's still true for Microsoft and Office.

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