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Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

For google docs, sharing is easy, collaboration is stupidly easy. My org has moved to google tools from office and I would say it's for the better. Previously everything was handled through emails and windows network drive (and this from an org with tens of subsidiaries and presence on every inhabited continent). Docs get lost a lot less nowadays. One can scream that content management is old stuff but google made it easy enough for corporate users just to jump aboard without expensive retraining.

That said - oh for the love of god, google docs writer editor is so bloody horrible for anything but simplest of documents and even structuring larger document bases through hyperlinking is awkward.

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> google docs writer editor is so bloody horrible

You can thank it to the broken ContentEditable HTML API. Google Docs v1 used it, for v2 Google reinvented the wheel by coding a word processor render engine using one DIVs per line. If only the browser vendors would fix the ContentEditable API, then a Google Docs implementation would need just a few lines of code. Multi column, multi page would be no problem with contenteditable. http://caniuse.com/#feat=contenteditable

Sadly, three of the big four browser vendors have a competitive advantage if their own cloud office suits cannot be reimplemented with a few lines of code.

> If only the browser vendors would fix the ContentEditable API, then a Google Docs implementation would need just a few lines of code.

Google Docs, by nature of its real-time collaboration features, cannot "just" use contentEditable.

Apparently ContentEditable is unfixable:

https://medium.com/medium-eng/why-contenteditable-is-terribl...

Thanks for the link. I wish all serious discussions about software design would take the time to enumerate the axioms (even if only implicit) used in the design.

To me the poor suitability of Google docs to writing traditional technical documentation the most irritating aspect. Automatic table of figures, references, math editor, etc. that have been more or less mainstream in document editors for decades.

> Previously everything was handled through emails and windows network drive (and this from an org with tens of subsidiaries and presence on every inhabited continent).

Have you heard about SharePoint? One of the goals of SharePoint is to solve such kind of problems your org once had.

Have you used Sharepoint? For every problem it "solves" five more are introduced. It is a monolithic nightmare of complexity and suck.

Yes I am using SharePoint at work and I am pretty happy with it. There might be some overhead for the IT dept but from the user's point of view I cannot see the problems it introduced.

Actually, now that you mention it, yes, SharePoint was one ingredient in the soup :) - I don't think SharePoint enabled collaboration was as friction free as through Google drive. Probably depends on the user and SharePoint version how well it works. But what I have observed - previously people would rather use the network drive or email docs than use sharepoint for distribution and now everyone just shares google docs links.

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