![]() It’s the same way the company treated Android, Chrome (both the browser and OS), Drive, Photos, and, of course, Search and Gmail.Īs internet access has become more and more widespread, the fact that Docs (like most of Google’s products) works best online was less of a hindrance. That’s the hallmark of products Google seems to really believe in. Google put a somewhat surprising amount of focus on the product over the last decade-plus, incrementally iterating and improving it at a steady pace. Google Docs clearly evolved past its early struggles, though. Indeed, right around the time Google ended development on Wave, the company added chat to Google Docs, letting people who had the same file open discuss what they were working on right alongside the content itself. But many of the things Google experimented with in Wave ended up living on in other places. Google didn’t do a great job explaining exactly what problem this new tool was designed to solve, and the company pulled the plug in 2010, after only a year. But interest dropped off quickly, in large part because it felt like even less of a finished product than most of Google’s “beta” launches. It was hyped by the tech press, so much that Google Wave invites were being sold on eBay. There were failures though, the most high-profile of which was Google Wave - an ambitious combination of instant messaging, email, documents, multimedia and more. But even though Google continued supporting applications that used Gears, a technology transition probably didn’t do the company any favors in getting Docs and its broader app suite adopted in businesses and education institutions.Īround this time, Google was experimenting with a variety of ways to push collaboration and communication forward - Docs was just one of the success stories. In late 2009, Google stopped development on Gears in favor of using the capabilities afforded by HTML 5. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the most stable tool. While the project was meant for any developer to use, using it for Google Docs made perfect sense. Gears was an open-source project and browser extension for Mac, Windows and Linux that would help web apps work with no internet connection. In May of 2007, at its first “worldwide developer day,” the company introduced Google Gears. It didn’t take Google long to realize it needed to come up with a way to sync documents to a computer for offline access. If you wanted to get some work while traveling, say on an airplane, Google Docs was a non-starter. While good broadband was fairly common in workplaces and universities, it was far less easy to find when you ventured out into the world. ![]() But more importantly, Google Docs only worked when you had an active internet connection. The text editor was, comparatively speaking, very simple. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t quite up to par with what Microsoft was offering with Office. As with most Google products at the time, it was released in beta for free. Barely seven months after that, Google officially released Docs and Sheets at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. “When we went to Google, Writely was internally adopted very quickly,” he said. According to Schillace, 90 percent of the company was using Writely only a month later. Google bought the company in March of 2006. Eight years earlier, he created a tool called Writely, a web-based text editing platform. Google Docs began as a “hacked together experiment,” its creator Sam Schillace said in an interview with The Verge in 2013. Collaborative work is a lot better than it used to be, and Google Docs is a big part of that – but it wasn’t always smooth sailing to get here. Making sure you had the most current version of the document usually involved six-digit numbers representing the last date it was modified, initials to note who had checked it out, and messy notes added to the end until you landed on something insanely convoluted like “April_Report_051504_NI_final_final_reallyfinal.doc.”ġ5 years later, I’m writing this story in a Google Doc shared with my editors they can make as many changes as they want to the finished parts of the draft as I keep typing away here and nothing will get lost. Submitting them to others for edits and notes was a fraught process. I was in a different career 15 years ago, one that required me to work on lots of spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations that were accessed in a shared network drive.
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