The Problems That Google Docs Never Solved
When we created Google Docs, our goal was to “solve collaboration”. It turns out that this is a complicated problem, and we only got as far as step one.
At the time, back in 2005, we framed this as the “emailing a Word file back and forth” problem. When people were collaborating on a document, they had to email drafts to one another. Inevitably they’d lose track of whether the latest version was “copy of copy of Quarterly Goals v3 (2)” or “copy of Quarterly Goals v4 (Steve’s edit)”.
We didn’t know we were making Google Docs. We were just three friends, not quite literally in a Silicon Valley garage but pretty nearly 1 , hacking together a little web app called Writely. My co-founder Sam had clued in on the fact that GMail’s message editor allowed font / size / style formatting, which meant you could do that in a browser, which meant we could do that in a browser. And that meant we finally had a viable path for attacking the damn Word file back-and-forth problem, which had been itching at us for years.
I’ve experienced one Going Viral moment, and it came when we quietly launched our little collaborative webapp. The world decided that we were A Scrappy Startup Taking On Microsoft, which was certainly news to us, but apparently made for a good story. And then came the out-of-the-blue email from someone on Google’s corporate development team, with subject line “Greetings from Google”, which Sam very nearly discarded as spam. But that’s all a story for another time.
