| The way that word processors are designed, essentially as very smart linked-lists of objects, would've actually allowed for the document collaboration very early on. We can perhaps speculate dozens of reasons why dis did not happen, but I guess it was for strategic reasons. But it will and is happening. Is about right making the point that IMHO the desktop office processor is far from dead, actually I would imagine a comeback of desktop UIs because they are so much easier to get right, especially when you have complex forms (which all business software has) or custom GUIs (such as those in software like Blender, Photoshop, Lightroom, etc). Question is did people really needed the collaboration feature so much, or as much as it was praised for decades... When it shows that source code (which IS one very important content) is being developed not collaboratively in real-time in the browser, but with the aid of various version control systems (CVS, SVN, GIT etc.) that is neither real-time, nor collaborative in the sense that Google DOX is. So the whole collaboration thing is fun to have, great thing to demo, but perhaps not the killer feature. Question is whether other features were more important and thus got implemented in the office packages. Such as enterprise integration capabilities and very powerful and well crafted WYSIWYG that is only possible with custom built engine. Let's be honest - the most complex apps that is typically running on an average desktop OS is the browser and the word/spreadsheet processor. Back in the day the browser was not a VM and was not that complex. And as OpenOffice showed - this is not very easy to get right. As WPS Office (the Chinese office) showed - even if the presentation layer is fast/correct, it is not really that easy to (originally) come up with it nor integrate it with other enterprise services. One may wonder whether MS Office was created to run best on Windows, or was it that Windows is made so to enable good run of MS Office and the integration of all this mandatory software that constitutes the modern enterprises... (again, trying to be as unbiased as possible) |
This is a good point. I don't think realtime collaboration is so important, but multiple author collaboration is. And "track changes" is a sort-of good-enough solution, but painful.
I've had good luck collaborating on documents (research papers) using latex and source control, but that assumes (a) participants are comfortable with both and (b) the storage format is amenable to revision control. Most word processing doesn't work well like this because you can get the document into a broken state in ways that are hard to recover from, and many of the users have no mental workflow map for "source control"
TeX/LateX or orgmode/Markdown type approaches have an advantage here for complicated collaboration.
These days a lot of collaborative stuff is being done outside of spreadsheets and word processing docs, the lines are blurrier and the collaboration is broader. In the "old days" a wiki might have done the trick for this but people want richer environments too. Not sure what he answer really is.