It really is infuriating how unnecessarily expensive and confusing Microsoft has made creating and exchanging simple document files. I talk to people all the time that are unsure about how they'll edit their resume on a new system or think they'll need a new copy of Office to update a file on their new computer (and then they're confused as to what version to buy). It's amazing how few normal people know about Google Docs - Google should really be pushing this on consumers more.
Microsoft might have made a lot of money off of this confusion, but in the process they've become the antithesis of "it just works" in a lot of people's eyes. They've made some of the most basic functions of computing an expensive pain in the ass for most of the PC era.
Revision history would be nice, but I can't really agree about lock-in: you can very quickly/easily download all of your files (even allowing you to specify different formats for each file type). Switching to, say, Dropbox, would take a few minutes at most.
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It really is infuriating how unnecessarily expensive and confusing Microsoft has made creating and exchanging simple document files. I talk to people all the time that are unsure about how they'll edit their resume on a new system or think they'll need a new copy of Office to update a file on their new computer (and then they're confused as to what version to buy). It's amazing how few normal people know about Google Docs - Google should really be pushing this on consumers more.
Microsoft might have made a lot of money off of this confusion, but in the process they've become the antithesis of "it just works" in a lot of people's eyes. They've made some of the most basic functions of computing an expensive pain in the ass for most of the PC era.
on the other hand i feel slightly locked in with google docs.
it doesn't seem to let me export my revision history, for example.
also, does it actually offer a download format such that:
"google docs" -> "download as" -> "upload to google docs"
returns you to exactly the same document?
Revision history would be nice, but I can't really agree about lock-in: you can very quickly/easily download all of your files (even allowing you to specify different formats for each file type). Switching to, say, Dropbox, would take a few minutes at most.