[saturdaysaint]

It really is infuriating how unnecessarily expensive and confusing Microsoft has made creating and exchanging simple document files. I talk to people all the time that are unsure about how they'll edit their resume on a new system or think they'll need a new copy of Office to update a file on their new computer (and then they're confused as to what version to buy). It's amazing how few normal people know about Google Docs - Google should really be pushing this on consumers more.

Microsoft might have made a lot of money off of this confusion, but in the process they've become the antithesis of "it just works" in a lot of people's eyes. They've made some of the most basic functions of computing an expensive pain in the ass for most of the PC era.

[exit]

on the other hand i feel slightly locked in with google docs.

it doesn't seem to let me export my revision history, for example.

also, does it actually offer a download format such that:

"google docs" -> "download as" -> "upload to google docs"

returns you to exactly the same document?

[saturdaysaint]

Revision history would be nice, but I can't really agree about lock-in: you can very quickly/easily download all of your files (even allowing you to specify different formats for each file type). Switching to, say, Dropbox, would take a few minutes at most.