“Ever found yourself trading email attachments with several colleagues, trying to collaborate on a document, only to have someone chime in at the last moment with corrections to an outdated version? Or emailing yourself a document just so you can move it from one computer to another?”
That was the pitch Google made 15 years ago as it announced Google Docs & Spreadsheets, the company’s web-based word-processing and spreadsheet product, in 2006. It was a game-changing pitch in a world dominated by Microsoft Office and other productivity software sold in boxes for home and work use—offline, that is.
In the first wave, the always-connected folks jumped in. It was free and available in a browser—with seamless sharing and collaboration—even if the features were limited. As the internet became more ubiquitous, documents as shared links instead of siloed files made
