Show HN: Version Control for Microsoft Word

Unfortunately can't check it out because I get "We are checking what's changed in this version. Won't be long..." for any test docx I upload / blank docx. Maybe server overloaded?

My two cents: Congratulations on launching your product! There simply is no real good versioning system for Office files, so this is a step in a good direction.

I agree with others that ditching all the "Git" references would be beneficial, because your target market most likely doesn't care about Git. What is missing in the versioning market is exactly what you may provide: A clear way to see what has changed where and an easy way to merge things together.

I do believe that you are missing a valid comparison / valid take on what Office 365 / SharePoint Online / OneDrive versioning can give you. Your main argument against it is "necessarily want the real-time coauthoring experience offered by Microsoft SharePoint or Google Docs., this can inhibit your ability to determine who is responsible for specific changes to content". Comparing Co-Authoring to versioning is comparing apples and oranges. The co-authoring experience in Microsoft products is great! I can work on a document with multiple people at the same time and I can even see in real-time what part of the document they are working on and what they are changing. We're working with multiple people on important documents simultaneously very often and this is a life saver.

Versioning of course could be better: SharePoint only offers you a main branch and no tags. That means I can go back to a different version, also compare that version to my current version or any other version (!) - but I don't have tags or a method to know that "version 12.0 from 07:02" was the version I was looking for. However the versioning system is very robust and proven. With products such as OneDrive / OneDrive for Business or Office 365 I have said versioning out of the box plus 100 other features. I don't know whether your versioning would make me want to switch just for the additions you show.

What I can't see in your demo (and can't test myself) is how you handle complex changes and this is where the meat is. Changing fox to wolf... yeah... I have documents where all heading format changes from Arial to Times New Roman and the bullet points are arrows now instead of bullets. Also my colleague has added three images and right aligned two of my images, oh yeah and applied some pretty image borders around some images. Would all of that show in the "what has changed" view of Simul? It would show when using SharePoint versioning together with Word. Granted: I can't see all these changes in SharePoint - but Word does show everything perfectly.

Again: Love the way you are going with this. The existing versioning could be made better, but besides branches and tagging I don't see any benefit compared to regular versioning using Microsoft products.

1000% agree.

FogBugz offered a server version where you could install on a private server yourself. They still offered a cloud version if you didn't want to manage the data yourself.

This point is huge. I'm a technical writer for a large conglomerate, but often get pulled into drafting or contributing to business documentation that is all created in Word. These things have to cross the desks of over a dozen different people spread across three continents so versioning is painful and it's often left to me to put everything back together. I need this product, but there is no way we can put sensitive sales and IP details onto some random cloud service.

Make this a standalone product and it's a no-brainer that can command an enterprise price point.

Decades ago I had started a company to do this, for all but executable files (that was for later) and finished a working prototype that was very fast, no known issues. The prototype was limited re file size because of extended/expanded memory issues with that Borland compiler, but the new compiler to solve that had already been published. Then Microsoft announced they were bringing out a similar product. My backer pulled out immediately thereafter, and that was the end of my company. But the Microsoft product never came out, after all... good old FUD.

Most of the damage done by not enforcing anti-monoploy laws is entirely invisible, the dogs that don't ever get a chance to bark.