How Google Docs Proved the Power of Less

The cliché has it that sufficiently advanced technologies are indistinguishable from magic. But if you agree with Dan McKinley’s quietly influential essay “Choose Boring Technology,” the desired end state of technologies isn’t to keep being magical but to become boring. Magic relies on the element of surprise, but the last thing you want on a transpacific flight is a surprise from the engine or a surprise passenger in the cockpit. In fact, commercial aviation technology is so advanced that it made flying—a levitation trick if there ever was one—boring.

Released in 2005, Google Docs has long passed the magic phase and graduated into the boring phase, so critiquing it in 2023 feels both anachronistic and overdue. It’s easy to locate its current place but more challenging to assess its original impact, because we’re just bad at remembering how life felt before transformational technologies. So let’s begin from the end: The status of Google Docs today is like that of a long-tenured academic whose early ideas brought about a sea change in the field but who thereafter went on a lifelong sabbatical. Even after its ambition went limp, however, it has remained relevant and influential, a trendsetting piece of software that new generations copy from and try to dethrone. 

Feature-wise, Google Docs shows that great software programs hew more to a logic of elimination than of addition. What makes them great isn’t always a larger feature set but how they make certain categories of problems impossible by design. (Similarly, one celebrated “feature” of the Rust programming language is that it makes memory leaks nearly impossible.) 

And while its forerunner Microsoft Word was a qualitative improvement over older word processors like WordStar and WordPerfect—which Microsoft Word had decimated to consolidate the market—Google Docs was a categorically different product from word processors, one that made the term “word processor” sound quaint. To defamiliarize Google Docs’ influence, it might help to rewind the frame even further back to the time when another categorical jump happened: when word processors decimated typewriters.

In Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, a professor of English and digital studies at the University of Maryland, details the changes—both habitual and psychological—that took place when writers started adopting word processors in lieu of typewriters. For those of us who aren’t dexterous users of mechanical typewriters, they can feel claustrophobic and constricting. With any kind of backtracking—scrolling up, deleting characters, moving the cursor backward (who am I kidding, there’s no cursor)—disallowed, it’s like being asked to advance on a narrow bridge without stepping back. (Try writing a high-stakes email without ever hitting backspace.) As swanky as they are, vintage typewriters are unusable for writing unless you are Don DeLillo, which I presume you aren’t.

Unlike the letters inked on a typewriter’s paper substrate, the text displayed on word processors obeys a different metaphysics, thus conferring a much higher degree of freedom. To use the semiotician Daniel Chandler’s phrase, the text onscreen is “suspended inscription.” It’s in an indeterminate and infinitely modifiable state until etched into or printed on a physical medium.

In this way, word processors allowed composition and revision—hitherto two different modes of writing—to become a single process. And as word processors were being adopted widely in the 1980s, Christina Haas, a composition researcher, found that the new graphical interface measurably impacted the “sense of the text” felt by authors. Word processing “allowed writers to grasp a manuscript as a whole, a gestalt,” writes Kirschenbaum, describing how such a mental model emerged. “The entire manuscript was instantly available via search functions. Whole passages could be moved at will, and chapters or sections reordered.” In other words, the linear process of writing got a dimensional upgrade, from 2D to 3D.

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 (one-to-one) exchange, you could now multicast (one-to-many) to your intended audience, and even broadcast it publicly (one-to-all) 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. 

Before examining Google Docs’ features, it’s worth acknowledging that all software features are the product of kleptomania, which in this field is rampantly practiced and knowingly forgiven. Google Docs’ edit history feature comes from, of course, Microsoft Word’s “Track Changes” feature, which can find its elementary form in WordPerfect. And Google Docs’ add-ons go way back to WordStar, which provided mail merging capabilities and spell checkers. Which is to say, debating who came up with a certain feature is not only a tricky exercise but also unfruitful. 

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. (Recall, also, that there was a time before helpful messages asking if you want to save before quitting.) 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. The combination of auto-save and syncing the file to the cloud likely saved a countless number of people (including me) from a sudden impulse of data-loss-induced self-harm.

Secondly, if you like the phrase “suspended inscription” (I do), 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 (call it A) is shared with another person, its identity diverges once you create a copy (call this B). But let’s say that you decide to work on A while waiting for B to be revised. Now there are two branches of the version. And what if you want to send another copy (C) to a third person? And what if the person who received B sends it to other people to review while version C gets sent to yet another group? This creates a number of issues: The source of truth is unclear, change history and access history are unknown, and versioning becomes a nightmare.

Google Docs eliminated the local file (the actual blob of textual data), 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 (versioning), preventing duplicate documents (divergence), and sharing a definitive version to multiple people (scalability).

When you share a Google Docs document, you share a pointer—not another instance of the data but a reference. So when multiple people are reading and editing, the question of “Is this the same version?” goes away. No one’s time is wasted commenting on outdated documents. A Google Docs document is an instance but also the only instance, namely, a “singleton.” In this sense, Google Docs operates under a kind of manuscriptural Platonism. 

The third eliminative feature of Google Docs is that it got rid of the necessity of a native app. Binary file formats like “.doc” and “.docx” are proprietary formats developed by Microsoft, so not only did you need to have Microsoft Word installed, your readers needed to have it as well. (And some pieces of software required a CD-ROM.) But you don’t even need a Google account to view documents in Google Docs.

But the real paradigm shift—if one is ever allowed to use the hackneyed phrase “paradigm shift,” it would be for the likes of this—was that for many of us, Google Docs was the first exposure to a “cloud application.” Its iconic real-time collaboration feature, wherein varicolored cursors roam around the document, was enabled by the distributed systems technologies behind it. Whereas blockchains seem like a solution in search of a problem, Google Docs was a killer app for the cloud before the term became part of the vernacular.

And if you can remember, the feature came out a few years after Google Docs was first launched. I’m not criticizing when I say that this feature isn’t so much an exemplar of technological originality as it is a triumph of good implementation. 

At the kernel of Google Docs’ collaborative editing feature is the Operational Transform (OT) technology. This algorithm ensures that, regardless of the order in which the edits are made, the final state of the document is consistent among all users. 

But as is often the case with technologies, in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not. And implementing OT correctly was a devilishly difficult endeavor. The first paper describing OT was published in 1989, but the algorithm had a number of correctness issues. It took two decades and many erroneous papers and implementations to make it usable. “The algorithms are really hard and time consuming to implement correctly,” wrote ex-Google Wave engineer Joseph Gentle. “Wave took 2 years to write and if we rewrote it today, it would take almost as long to write a second time.”

OT is like an impossibly deft juggler who keeps in the air an ever changing number of objects—think characters added and deleted by the whims of the users—as different in kind as rubber balls, ninepins, colored hoops, and sea urchins (e.g., cursor, highlight, comment), while making the orbital motion look as reliable as a ferris wheel.

Fast-forward to 2023. Unlike other forms that have a finality, software products—even the great ones—can never purchase immunity from later mediocrity. In its time, OS X 10.4 Tiger, originally released in 2005 and shipping features like Spotlight and Voiceover for the first time, is remembered as one of the best of Apple’s Mac operating systems. But even the most die-hard Apple fans would balk at the idea of bringing it back to life.

Simply put, software doesn’t age well. Hardware, in time, always becomes obsolete, but if it survives long enough—think Olympia typewriters—it transfigures from junk to a vintage electronic or gets a shot at a stylistic reincarnation (skeuomorphism or going “retro”). But rarely does anyone reserve the same kind of generosity for a piece of crummy old software. Which is to say, when people hate on software products, the hatred is not the more complex and sticky kind directed to, say, Philip Roth. People really want to see no more of it.

And 17 years after the launch of Google Docs, its adoption is widespread but nowhere universal. If your workplace is filled with Macs more than Lenovos, you might be surprised to learn that Microsoft Word still dominates in market share. 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. What baffles me is that the intervening years since Google Docs’ initial launch provided more than enough time to achieve feature parity with Microsoft Word, but it’s as if Google Docs never mustered the will. Instead, it has focused on small-time features (emoji reactions), and recent product announcements (“pageless” format, for example) have strained to surprise. 

During those lackluster development cycles, the word-processing space has been filled with a glut of writing apps. Not always successful but boldly experimental, they are more minimalist, maximalist, hipster, thoughtful, annoying, customizable, opinionated, over/under-engineered than Google Docs. To name names, Bear, Coda, Airtable, Notion, Overleaf, Scrivener, iA Writer, Ulysses, and Obsidian come to mind. 

Google Docs, though well made, has never felt artisanal the way iA Writer or Ulysses does. But it would be a mistake to insist too much on its lesser aspects. Using OT successfully, once and for all, showed that the complexity of real-time editing could be tamed, an evidence proof to which many collaborative software programs of today owe their existence. OT also forged a path for more elegant collaborative solutions—like, for those who care, conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs), which are used in domains such as music (SoundCloud) and design (Figma). In the genetics of modern software, it'd be rare to find software programs where Google Docs’ DNA segments are completely absent.

And because the usage pattern of those other writing apps turned out to be more pluralistic—i.e., instead of relying on a single general-purpose app, users employ different apps for quick note-taking (Apple Notes), drafting (iA Writer), scriptwriting (Scrivener), reference management(Zotero)—Google Docs still excels in universality and has achieved a near-protocol status. Google Docs may be second-rate in the second-rate and third-rate features, but it's first-rate in the first-rate ones. For what it's worth, this article was edited in Google Docs.