If Microsoft Word is like a combo kit of DeWalt power tools, Google Docs is a budget Swiss Army knife that is serviceable but always leaves more to be desired.
Google Docs enabled similar gestalt shifts. For writers, the boundary between solo drafting and collaborative editing eroded. Whereas sharing a text file created by word processors was a unicast exchange, you could now multicast to your intended audience, and even broadcast it publicly to be read by thousands of Anonymous Penguins and Anonymous Dolphins. An easy video game analogy to describe this progression would be going from 2D to 3D to 3D MMORPG.
With that preamble, let’s examine Google Docs’ capabilities, beginning with its eliminative features, of which three are worth numbering. First, remember the Save button? Invariably in the icon of a floppy disk—the emblem of unreliable storage—it demanded much attention, and you’d ignore it at your peril. Google Docs obviated the need for the Save button. In turn, it also eliminated the lingering uneasiness in the subconscious—concerns about losing data in the recesses of the mind—and thus dispelled a gnawing anxiety when using word processors.
Secondly, if you like the phrase “suspended inscription” , you can see how Google Docs took its ethereal form to the next level, quite literally, to the cloud—and in doing so, solved an array of problems that arise when the canonical version of a document is hard to locate. Many of us have had back-and-forth exchanges sending and receiving files named like “REAL_FINAL_DRAFT4.docx”. When a local file is shared with another person, its identity diverges once you create a copy .
Google Docs eliminated the local file , and in doing so, it also eliminated the psychological and logistics problem of tracking the single source of truth. Its documents are accessed via a URL—a kind of “pointer” in the computer science lingo—that “points” to remotely stored data. Therein lies Google Docs’ solution to accurately maintaining a single revision history , preventing duplicate documents , and sharing a definitive version to multiple people .
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