[Zigurd]

The Google suite of Apps was born multiuser. They perform better then Microsoft's apps when multiple people, even dozens of them, are bashing on a single shared document. Document sharing is more powerful than sharing a window or a desktop. It changes the way people work together.

[IAmBroom]

I would not have agreed readily with that statement until three years ago, when I actually started working in GS as part of my job. I couldn't have imagined how seemless and well-implemented collaborative editing had become IRL.

[Romario77]

yes, that's true. It also brings the issues related to that - it's easy to delete the whole org data, change things uncontrollably, corrupt the data, there entries in the tables are free-form (well, you have to do programming to make it more robust).

it works fine initially, but for long term it's usually more productive to have custom software.

[conductr]

> it's usually more productive to have custom software.

If you multiplied the custom software development effort and cost to the multitude of places and use cases people in an organization are using spreadsheets I think you’d quickly find that it’s infeasible. And that’s not even taking into account how much value the adhoc-ability of spreadsheets adds to the equation. Most spreadsheets can be completely refactored or thrown away in a rather trivial manner. The sprint nature of software development screens out most things that could be spreadsheets. I’ll build it in an hour instead of waiting 2 weeks to get on the next sprint.

The software development process is too rigid for rapidly changing business needs. Having to spec out requirements and such is often an unknown and something you’re doing live in the moment when creating the spreadsheet itself.

[Zigurd]

Google Workspace apps all (?) have versioning.

[curioussquirrel]

This is true, but sadly for very large spreadsheets, it kind of stops working at a certain point. You get timeouts when loading cell history or the version of the spreadsheet version history.