[googledocsftw]

Except I can do things today that were not possible in 1999 like easily collaborate on a google doc realtime with someone on the other side of the planet, get an automated grammar expert to suggest edits and then have a video call with 15 people to discuss more about it. All in the same app, the browser, all on a whim, all high speed and to boot: all for free as in beer. And this is run of the mill YaaaaawN productivity tools.

I can also create a web scale app in a weekend using AWS. It is just insane what we can do now vs. 1999. I remember in early 2000s Microsoft boasting how it could host a site for the olympics using active server pages. This was PR worthy. That would be a side project for most of us now using our pocket money.

[jcgrillo]

That's interesting, personally I've never found collaborative editing to be of any use, but the comments feature is instead the one I use, and often it works less well than the way we used to do it with inline comments (e.g. italicized or made a different color). The one advantage would be automatically merging comments from multiple reviewers, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Often the collection of comments from different reviewers each forms their own narrative, and merging it all into a chaotic mess drowns out each individual's perspective. Personally I'd rather treat each reviewer's critique individually. 1999 technology handles this just fine.

Same for video calls. Screen sharing can be useful at times, but it would be easy distribute materials to all participants and collaborate on a conference call. You'll have better audio latency that way. So it's not super obvious to me that the latest Wunderwaffe are actually significantly better, but it is clear they use a hell of a lot more compute cycles and bandwidth.