> All these products have improved incrementally, adding new features in an unobtrusive way.
Sure, but there’s unobtrusive, and then there’s completely imperceptible. Where are these new features? I can’t think of anything that’s been added to Google Docs in years.
I often get stuck trying to do something and search for “How to do X in Google Docs”, only to discover that they haven’t gotten around to implementing something super basic.
Like placeholders in template documents. You can create a template document in Google Docs, but as far as I can tell, it’s just a normal document with a different way to make a copy of it. You can’t set up placeholders! Surely that’s the whole point of template documents‽ It feels like an intern had a passing interest in implementing templates then left before they finished. And then nobody was interested in working on it for years afterwards.
Out of interest, I searched for a changelog and found this:
https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9228272
Does this seem like anything other than a mothballed project to you? This is meant to be a flagship product from a giant company, and they were barely scraping together one tiny feature per month until September 2020, then lost interest and managed just one single new feature in the nine months since then. And you still can’t do super basic things with it.
But hey, at least they found the time to completely rewrite the UI layer, right? You don’t see how this appears to be a team who feels zero market pressure treating it like a retirement hobby rather than a job, right?