A recent blog post about the state of Google’ services caught my attention. The provocatively titled “Google blew a ten-year lead” makes the case that innovation across many services – Google Docs, Sheets, Drive, Gmail, among others – has stagnated. This part about “office” software in particular:
Docs and Sheets haven’t changed in a decade. Google Drive remains impossible to navigate. Sharing is complicated.
I’ve given up on Google Docs. I can never find the documents Andy shares with me. The formatting is tired and stuck in the you-might-print-this-out paradigm. Notion is a much better place to write and brainstorm with people.
When it comes to Docs, Google’s lead was well over ten years. I was an early user of Writely, which Google bought in 2006. What is routine today was magical fifteen years ago. After that it quickly launched the triad of cloud word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software complete with auto-save and real-time collaboration.
And in 2012, Drive brought it all together. Now you had a browser-based way to manage all your Google documents plus other files that you chose to upload. This was a pretty good place to be in 2012.
Since then, Drive + Docs/Sheets/Slide have steadily improved. There’s now richer editing, versioning, APIs, cross-application embedding (a portion of a Sheet inside Docs), publish to the web, fine-grained sharing and increasingly capable mobile apps. Drive behaves in some ways like a desktop application with right-click menus, multi-item select, drag-and-drop – all inside a browser.
But when the writer compares Docs to Notion, you realise that what I just described is iterative improvements on the old desktop-based paradigm pioneered in the 80s by Lotus and then Microsoft Office [1]. Notion is internet-native documents [2]. They resemble web pages more than documents. They blend together databases and linear pages and can switch between those views. Hierarchies are seamless and natural. Collaboration is workspace-first, which is really how teams work, distributed or not. I may be a skeptic about the use of Notion as a general-purpose information management system, but I think it is more naturally suited to online collaborative work than Google Docs. It is, quite literally, a paradigm shift.
(ends)
[1] This is not to diminish the work that has gone into this.
[2] The super-new Roam Research is interesting as well.