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eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

workspaceupdates.googleblog.com

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Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#151

Post by josephg »

jppittma wrote: post #139
rcme wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. From what I've seen, a lot software gets built by a small group of people. It becomes wildly popular and the is maintained by a behemoth churning out minor features at a snails pace while everyone frets about the even the smallest product changes. It's easy to experiment and build when your product is small and few people use it. When you're bringing in real money and most of the Fortune 500 is using yo…

Well, yeah, because the risk/reward of the decision making changes, purely in terms of dollars/second for an outage, never-mind legal and reputation risk.

Also, the value of features follows a power law. Some features are incredibly valuable to everyone. Some features only a few people care about. And then there’s a long tail.

In a product as old as Google docs, they honestly have all the important features that most people actually care about already. You can save. You can track changes. You can set up custom styles. Or embed images. You can edit docs collaboratively. Or programmatically via their api. Documents look the same on basically everyone’s computer. And they can be in shared folders for teams.

At some point every product runs out of high value, visible features to add that anyone cares about. This isn’t a failure mode. It’s the opposite. This is the final state that most successful software should aspire to reach.

I have a lot more respect for teams that understand this, and let their products find their UX steady state. Fastmail. Git. Vim. WhatsApp. And yes, Google docs.

Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#152

Post by pluto_modadic »

bombolo wrote: post #112
gumby wrote: post #72

My ID card has a chip in it and can be used to sign documents. Why not support that?

Why make a proper real legal signature when you can just copy paste a scanned .jpg file at the end of a document (or do something equally useless)?

copy-paste a png of you typing your name recording your IP...

...vs cryptographic proof someone had access to your ID card

Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#153

Post by puppymaster »

crazygringo wrote: post #85
danielrhodes wrote: post #23

First this is a great idea. Finally there is some movement on making Google Docs better. I haven't used the feature, but from reading the blog post it is sad to see how poorly Google executes on products, even at the beta stage. Some context: I've built such a product before and eSigs are more simple than they seem as long as you do a few things. 1) You need to verify somebody's identity. Sending them an email with t…

> Finally there is some movement on making Google Docs better. I just find these comments to be so strange. You can look at all of the articles in that blog to see all of the feature improvements that have launched in Docs over the past 2 years. It's a lot of stuff. Maybe they're not features that matter to you, some are available only to paid customers as opposed to free tier, or maybe you just haven't bothered to e…

As a daily Google Sheet users, I am thankful and amazed by the monthly, or even daily improvement of the product for the past 5 years. Folks will be surprised how many hedge funds and quants use them for quick idea sketch

Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#154

Post by remus »

josephg wrote: post #151
jppittma wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah, because the risk/reward of the decision making changes, purely in terms of dollars/second for an outage, never-mind legal and reputation risk.

Also, the value of features follows a power law. Some features are incredibly valuable to everyone. Some features only a few people care about. And then there’s a long tail. In a product as old as Google docs, they honestly have all the important features that most people actually care about already. You can save. You can track changes. You can set up custom styles. Or embed images. You can edit docs collaboratively.…

> In a product as old as Google docs, they honestly have all the important features that most people actually care about already. You can save. You can track changes. You can set up custom styles. Or embed images. You can edit docs collaboratively. Or programmatically via their api. Documents look the same on basically everyone’s computer. And they can be in shared folders for teams.

I think this is pretty interesting, because I don't necessarily agree. If we were starting from a blank slate in a world where a spreadsheet hadn't existed before I suspect the perfect spreadsheet software would look pretty different to Google sheets or excel, but because this software has been around for a long time they're part of the standard interfaces for computers, like a mouse or keyboard. If you deviate too far from the current design people get confused and default back to what they know i.e. excel with all it's quirks.

Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#155

Post by bombolo »

pluto_modadic wrote: post #152
bombolo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why make a proper real legal signature when you can just copy paste a scanned .jpg file at the end of a document (or do something equally useless)?

copy-paste a png of you typing your name recording your IP... ...vs cryptographic proof someone had access to your ID card

> ...vs cryptographic proof someone had access to your ID card

Which isn't what we are discussing here, this was the point… :)

Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#156

Post by TeMPOraL »

rcme wrote: post #135
crazygringo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finally there is some movement on making Google Docs better. I just find these comments to be so strange. You can look at all of the articles in that blog to see all of the feature improvements that have launched in Docs over the past 2 years. It's a lot of stuff. Maybe they're not features that matter to you, some are available only to paid customers as opposed to free tier, or maybe you just haven't bothered to e…

I don't know. From what I've seen, a lot software gets built by a small group of people. It becomes wildly popular and the is maintained by a behemoth churning out minor features at a snails pace while everyone frets about the even the smallest product changes. It's easy to experiment and build when your product is small and few people use it. When you're bringing in real money and most of the Fortune 500 is using yo…

And yet Microsoft manages to make regular, significant feature additions (and occasional, less nice/useful large changes), despite being a critical software dependency for pretty much all of the Fortune 500.

Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#157

Post by pie420 »

puppymaster wrote: post #153
crazygringo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finally there is some movement on making Google Docs better. I just find these comments to be so strange. You can look at all of the articles in that blog to see all of the feature improvements that have launched in Docs over the past 2 years. It's a lot of stuff. Maybe they're not features that matter to you, some are available only to paid customers as opposed to free tier, or maybe you just haven't bothered to e…

As a daily Google Sheet users, I am thankful and amazed by the monthly, or even daily improvement of the product for the past 5 years. Folks will be surprised how many hedge funds and quants use them for quick idea sketch

hedge funds and quants also use pen and paper for quick idea sketch.

Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#158

Post by pie420 »

gauravphoenix wrote: post #29

This isn't a DocuSign killer yet and won't be for a while until Google get its enterprise story right. DocuSign is deeply integrated with third party workflows in large organizations. That's where the big bucks are and you can build a sticky business.

Google won't release an "X-killer" until Google is broken up by anti-monopoly regulators. Until then, google will let millions of dollars of easy money go by in order to avoid giving regulators examples of google using it's control of the internet to replicate products and push the incumbent companies out of business. This is why all google features are half-baked and killed. Fear of regulators.

Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#159

Post by pie420 »

notfried wrote: post #2

14 months in testing, followed by a beta, is really moving too slow.

This is an intentionally crippled product. Google can't afford to give regulators a reason to go after them for a couple billion dollars. Google or Microsoft could easily have created a DocuSign competitor and killed DocuSign, like they killed netscape, wordperfect, etc. Now that they respectively control the internet and the enterprise software suite, they have one primary goal: protect and grow the cash cow. Everything else is a marketing exercise or a concessionary project given to keep busy the tens of thousands of computer scientists that they are paying to keep out of competitors/startups payrolls.

Re: eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

#160

Post by blitzar »

dudus wrote: post #126
Galanwe wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And then we have what Google is offering: > From the screenshots, I think it is only a fake wet signature. I'm not sure how valid that is Welcome to 2023! I've bought a house, incorporated a company, signed a work contract and contracted a lawyer just based on Adobe mobile wet signatures on PDFs.

2023? All my signatures at least in the last decade were fake wet signatures. All leasing docs, employment docs, and banks... I use the Preview App that comes standard on OSX. You scan a signature on a piece of paper with your webcam. Then you can just "paste it" anywhere, I even give it a dark blue shade. I had a single person give me shit and say they needed "ink on paper" insisting me to print/sign/scan. I just ra…

I do the same - if anyone asks, I tell them it is a scanned copy.

I honestly did look at conformed signatures etc with a desire to do things "properly". However, all too often it was a problem - so fake signature it is.

I do one extra step and "print to pdf" so that signature and annotations (if I have typed in content on a form) are flattened in the final pdf.

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