![]() ![]() ![]() 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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