Collaboration over jupyter notebooks has been available in CoCalc [ https://cocalc.com/ ], formerly the SageMathCloud online notebook, for several years now. I wonder what prompted Google to introduce this.
Googler here, no relation to the colab team. What probably prompted us to introduce this is that it was an internal project that many of us really really like and use quite often, and we thought it would be nice if you guys could use it too. That's it. It was probably somebody's 20% project at first, I don't think there was any great ambition for an actual product when they started it.
Googlers tend to reinvent the wheel a lot because somebody here likes some tool or library or application, wants to use it, but wants to avoid licensing restrictions, incompatibilities with our internal tools, wants total control over its development so they can change and add things as they see fit, etc. Then it grows up and gets a team with a PM and everything, and if it does really well we might share it and let it out of its cage into the wild. You can take it or leave it.
Also did I mention that I really really like colab? I've been evangelizing it to my team at Google Cloud support for all kinds of things like playbooks, reproductions, easily modifiable tools and scripts, etc. It's like Google docs for jupyter notebooks, it's pretty great.
Googlers tend to reinvent the wheel a lot because somebody here likes some tool or library or application, wants to use it, but wants to avoid licensing restrictions, incompatibilities with our internal tools, wants total control over its development so they can change and add things as they see fit, etc. Then it grows up and gets a team with a PM and everything, and if it does really well we might share it and let it out of its cage into the wild. You can take it or leave it.
Also did I mention that I really really like colab? I've been evangelizing it to my team at Google Cloud support for all kinds of things like playbooks, reproductions, easily modifiable tools and scripts, etc. It's like Google docs for jupyter notebooks, it's pretty great.