As I’ve noted before, I’ve enjoyed using Writely to write the oracle+jboss report I’ve been working on. It’s collaborative features highlight the major deficiency of word processing as we know it.
While those of you code-heads who use CVS, SVN, etc. on a daily basis are used to the idea of easily being able to concurrently edit text, see who’s made past edits, and easily see the differences between each revision of the text the rest of the infowork world has to suffer through emailing around documents and spreadsheets and sorting out the forks that happen. I’ve seen Kim suffer through this, and it can drive you insane.
That’s part of the reason why people get so excited about Google doing a word processor or other “Office” like applications: we’re hoping we can beat the law implied by that great Churchill quote, “democracy is a terrible form of government, save for all those others that are even worse,” that we’ve been stuck with for so long.
(Thanks to Steve for the news tip-off.)
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