[josephg]

Yep. And even aside from security, its a nightmare needing to maintain multiple versions of a product. "Oh, our software is crashing? What version do you have? Oh, 4.5. Well, update 4.7 from 2 years ago may fix your problem, but we've also released major versions 5 and 6 since then - no, I'm not trying to upsell you ma'am. We'll pull up the code from that version and see if we can figure out the problem."

Having evergreen software that just keeps itself up to date is marvellous. The Google Docs team only needs to care about the current version of their software. There are no documents saved with an old version. There's no need to backport fixes to old versions, and no QA teams that need to test backported security updates on 10 year old hardware.

Its just a shame about, y'know, the aptly named crowdstrike.

[chrisjj]

> The Google Docs team only needs to care about the current version of their software. There are no documents saved with an old version.

There sure are. I have dozens saved years ago.

[josephg]

Fine. But Google can mass-migrate all of them to a new format any time they want. They don’t have the situation you used to have with Word, where you needed to remember to Save As Word 2001 format or whatever so you could open the file on another computer. (And if you forgot, the file was unreadable). It was a huge pain.

[chrisjj]

Yes it is better than the Word situation, but no it isn't not caring. There do exist old format docs and Google does have to care - to make that migration.

[josephg]

Yes, they have to migrate once. But they don’t need to maintain 8 different versions of Word going back a decade, make sure all security patches get back ported (without breaking anything along the way), and make all of them are in some way cross compatible despite having differing feature sets.

If google makes a new storage format they have to migrate old Google docs. But that’s a once off thing. When migrations happen, documents are only ever moved from old file formats to new file formats. With word, I need to be able to open an old document with the new version of word, make changes then re-save it so it’s compatible with the old version of word again. Then edit it on an old version of word and go back and forth.

I’m sure the Google engineers are very busy. But by making Docs be evergreen software, they have a much easier problem to solve when it comes to this stuff. Nobody uses the version of Google docs from 6 months ago. You can’t. And that simplifies a lot of things.

[chrisjj]

> Yes, they have to migrate once.

They have to migrate each time they change the format, surely. Either that or maintain converters going back decades, to apply the right one when a document is opened.

> but they don’t need to maintain 8 different versions of Word going back a decade, make sure all security patches get back ported

Nor does Microsoft for Word.

> With word, I need to be able to open an old document with the new version of word, make changes then re-save it so it’s compatible with the old version of word again.

You don't have to, unless you want the benefit of that.

And Google Docs offers the same.

> Nobody uses the version of Google docs from 6 months ago. You can’t. And that simplifies a lot of things.

Well, I'd love to use the version of Gmail web from 6 months ago. Because three months ago Google broke email address input such that it no longer accesses the contacts list and I have to type/paste each address in full.

That's a price we pay for things being "simpler" for a software provider than can and does change the software I am using without telling me let alone giving me the choice.

Not to mention the change that took away a large chunk of my working screen space for an advert telling me to switch to the app version, despite have the latest version of Google's own Chrome. An advert I cannot remove despite having got the message 1000 times. Pure extortion. Simplification is no excuse.