[chippiewill]

It's utterly bizarre just how much Google docs seems to have dropped the ball.

It really feels like they haven't developed the product in the past 10 years. This is the first significant feature change that I can recall in a very long time other than minor UI tweaks.

[theptip]

Agreed. It’s really weird; because of the bundling advantage, they don’t have to be better than Notion, they just need to be good enough that the convenience factor wins out.

It’s also frustrating because if Google played to their strengths, Docs could be best-in-class; the real problem that everybody is struggling with is internal knowledge management. Why can’t Google build me a privately indexed knowledge graph of my internal docs, then let me use Google’s search to answer questions? It’s insane that this is not their product strategy for Docs. This should be “easy” to wire up, they have all of the tech already for google.com search.

People like notion because it is easier to structure nested Wiki docs quickly, but you still have the same problems eventually of needing to curate your knowledge base, and things becoming too hard to find past a certain scale.

Instead we get Data Loss Prevention and a bunch of other box-ticking features which, sure, are how you close enterprise deals to displace Microsoft. But I think they are sleeping on their vulnerability to disruption plays from the bottom of the market, and they need to invest more in building a moat here. Make the free/SMB customers delighted, and you starve potential competitors of the oxygen they need to grow into a competitor at the enterprise level.

[Lealen]

It's probably not available because someone decided that it should be only available for enterprise customers, take a look: https://workspace.google.com/products/cloud-search/

[theptip]

Thanks, I wasn’t aware of that feature (and I pay for Enterprise gsuite, so that tells you something about either my attention to Google product details, or the level of advertisement of this feature :)

I do wonder if this is actually building a semantic knowledge graph of the content, vs. just providing a dynamic facade/aggregator for other apps’ search APIs, and doing “old style” text indexing/searching within Workspace services. It looks like the former based on a cursory read of the docs.

It would be more challenging to build a knowledge graph over {drive,slack,Jira,…} documents, but if they just build a knowledge graph within Workspace that could provide more reason to use Docs vs. Notion/Confluence, or Google Chat over Slack. So there is actually a strong product/market reason to build this as a native feature even if you can’t solve it for other apps.

[polote]

> Why can’t Google build me a privately indexed knowledge graph of my internal docs

Not easy to do [1]. But that's what we try to to at Dokkument [2]

And also knowledge is spread around different tools, Github, monday, JIRA, Confluence, Slack. It is not all on Google Docs. And is Google is not the most integrated product

> People like notion because it is easier to structure nested Wiki docs quickly

I don't feel like it is the case. You can't retrieve anything unless you know the title of the document or you have saves the URL. Most people don't prefer Notion and some do, because they are list-addicted people, and it is easier to list documents in Notions than in Google Sheet. Notion doesn't fix any knowledge management problems compared to using Google Drive. And Confluence still makes circles around Notion in that area

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597895

[2] https://dokkument.com

[catmanjan]

I’m not convinced Googles smart knowledge engine would work in that environment, it probably relies on lots of people doing lots of searches and clicking links etc

Compared to only the searches being done by a single business and no links in documents

[samwillis]

81% of Googles revenue is from advertising, only 7.5% is from Cloud Services (Google Workplaces and Google Cloud Platform) I think its fairly safe to assume that the majority of that cloud revenue is from their Cloud Platform, not Workplaces. So it wouldn't surprise me if its as little as 1-2% of revenue (it could easily be less than 1%). There is no surprise then that it is such a low priority for them. It's mostly a box ticking exercise to ensure that they can sell more stuff to enterprises and hold Microsoft back a little.

[bushbaba]

>I think its fairly safe to assume that the majority of that cloud revenue is from their Cloud Platform, not Workplaces.

I'm not sure I'd make that assumtion. Google workplaces makes a lot of revenue. $20/user/month * 100k users in a large company is 24MM/year. I'm sure GCP will grow faster, but Google workplaces has had more market penetration for longer.

[lowbloodsugar]

I'd bet that if a company has 100k employees, it's not paying $20/user/month.

[adrianomartins]

I totally understand this vision, google docs, google sites, google drive must be really down in Google's priority list. Heck, Google Meet was down there up until two years ago.

The problem I think is that, little by little, users start stepping outside the Google bubble and they start to realize that there's clear benefits. I used to be a 100% google person, then we started using dropbox paper for documents, notion for company wiki (and personal notes too), tandem for video calls.

In 2022, our company is using Google only for email, calendar, and sheets. Two years ago we'd be crazy to even think about that. We're up to the point were it wouldn't seem crazy to go with the Microsoft suite, to be honest.

[samwillis]

> We're up to the point were it wouldn't seem crazy to go with the Microsoft suite, to be honest.

I think for a lot of companies not going with Office is crazy, Google docs isn't good enough, and who's wants to have 7-10 different suppliers for different products (email, calendar, sheets, docs, presentations, wiki, chat, video). Far easer to just buy one cohesive system.

There is probably an opportunity for one of the larger players to acquire the others and move back towards a cohesive platform. There would be push back but I suspect it would pay off. Imagine Airtable, Notion and Slack under one operation.

[luibelgo]

2021 revenue was $257 billion, 1% revenue is a lot of money still

[Already__Taken]

I'm heavy into Google and hard a lot of gsuite education deployed. I was always agasp at how Google just doesn't improve gdocs/sheets sometimes at all for years. why do the two programs have different table/cell markup up and even options...

[Andrex]

The table limitations in Docs are really the biggest thing that grind my gears about the service.

[benhurmarcel]

I find it incredible that Docs is still unable to number headings. And they're trying to sell it to large organizations...

[rwmj]

Also no line numbering! I can't believe they have any lawyers as customers since line numbers are essential for them.

[slig]

I think it's great as this gives new companies the opportunity to eat their lunch.

[zelphirkalt]

It is just the bare minimum, that most people using a word processor, can understand. They probably made it to grab some market share and then stoppen right there. It is nowhere close to being a workhorse to build upon for anyone, who has any professionalism in their workings with WYSIWYG word processors. Professional documents do not make use of direct formatting. One does not simply click a "bigger font size" button thrice or the "bold" button or whatever. Google Docs is a toy and I wont consider any document created in it in any way professional.

[jfoster]

Considering the fates of other Google products, that's a great outcome. At least it didn't end up like Gchat or Google Reader.

[pradn]

A feeling of progress is hard to convey to users if the iceberg is mostly invisible. I assume much of the work on Google Docs is harder to see like backend improvements/scalability, rendering compatibility across platforms, file-format compatibility with MS Word (both being able to read/write with high fidelity and supporting the useful features).

But if we look at release notes for the past year, we see a sequence of smaller features.[1] These include ML-driven quick replies for comments, being easily add smart links to people/docs/lists, being able to add image watermarks, and Japanese grammar suggestions. These announcements are in small blog posts [2], and are usually covered by the tech media [3] (largely summaries with a bit of flavor or - cheekily - instructions on how to turn features off). It is hard to feel like there's major progress in Google Docs when features, even useful ones, trickle out like this. Perhaps the big release every year model isn't that bad, for communication purposes. It's just not in the DNA of Google or any online service, however.

If you look at the roadmap for Google Workspace, it's very much about collaboration.[4] This plays to the brand and strength of the online-first vision of Google Apps - it's easy to jump in and collaborate on docs, the suite works well together. I think companies that choose Google Workspace do so to transform the way they work. It's not really about just replicating the Microsoft experience on the web.

That said, I think Microsoft has done an amazing job pulling their apps to the web and adding collaboration/sync. Their online version of Word has basically no caveats, and their realtime editing is even better than Google Docs in some edge cases. So its unclear which way the market will go. Perhaps Microsoft has effectively fended off the online-first threat and can use its inertia and muscle to keep Office at the top. In any case, we'll move to a more heterogenous world where many suites or even individual tools are viable businesses.

[1]: https://support.google.com/a/table/7314896?hl=en

[2]: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/10/easily-add-t...

[3]: https://9to5google.com/2021/10/20/google-docs-menu/

[4]: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/the-future-...

Disclaimer: I work at Google and used to work in the division that develops Google Docs. These are all my opinions.