I've been listening to the Acquired podcast about Google (part 2), talking about Google Docs – around 43 minutes in;

Ben: But here’s what I will say, David. If you were starting on the foot of competing with Microsoft, or trying to build a word processor, or trying to build a spreadsheet, you would be doomed for failure. What Google was doing was saying there is something that is uniquely possible with web applications and AJAX in this Web 2.0 era for the first time. That thing is real-time collaboration.

David: Real-time multi-user collaboration. These were the first I’ve tried to wrack my brain. I talked to Sam Schillace, the founder of Writely, which Google acquired, which became Google Docs. He believes these were the first real-time multi-user collaborative pieces of software in history. It just wasn’t possible before the web.

Ben: Jonathan Rochelle, the founder of the company that would be acquired, that would become Google Spreadsheets, basically said the same thing. His comment was, we actually didn’t know if it was possible to do this in the web. Google said, based on the success we’re seeing with Gmail, I bet we could do actual spreadsheets in the browser with real-time collaboration. When the Sheets team came in, it was truly an open question of, can we make it so you and another person can party on the same very basic spreadsheet at the same time?

This first highlighed point is slightly wrong; it wasn't possible before the web on a personal computer. But, hard as it is to imagine today, there were other computers before the PC.

I'm going to start off with a little bit of history; anyone familiar with the history of computers will probably be aware of Douglas Engelbart. I wrote 'Augmenting Human Intellect' around the time of his death in 2013; he's often credited as the inventor of the computer mouse, which (as that post goes into in some detail) is a massive over-simplification of his work. (Just search for "Mother of all demos".)

When Steve Jobs accused Microsoft of stealing Apple's work on the GUI, Bill Gates' retort was "I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it." But Xerox's system was based on Douglas Engelbart's research work at SRI;

from Wikipedia's "History of the graphical user interface;

Engelbart's work directly led to the advances at Xerox PARC. Several people went from SRI to Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. In 1973, Xerox PARC developed the Alto personal computer. It had a bitmapped screen, and was the first computer to demonstrate the desktop metaphor and graphical user interface (GUI).

There's an anecdote¹ about Douglas Englebart meeting Steve Jobs, where Englebart recalls being baffled by the fact that there was no networking built into his computer – "It has no access to anyone else's documents, to e-mail, to common repositories of information. Steve said, 'All the computing power you need will be on your desk top.' I told him, 'But that's like having an exotic office without a telephone or door.' Engelbart's team had been working with electronic mail since the 1970s – they knew how useful it was to have a networked computer. But Jobs wasn't interested.

My dad worked at Rank Xerox for a good chunk of my formative years - I remember visiting his office at Albion House² as a kid when my school was closed, and seeing around the office – the massive room-sized printer/copiers, the fancy boardrooms, the wine cellar, learning about the difference between a "PC" and networked workstations. But to be honest, the most memorable things for me were the coffee machine that served free hot chocolate in one of those little plastic cups, spinning around on the office chairs, and the really cool little comic shop just up the road.^2b This must have been around 1988 (or not long after.)

But the real story is around September 1995. I was at the start of a year out between A-levels and university, and my dad – clearly to stop me from sitting around doing nothing and wasting the year – had got me a temp job doing data entry at his office. They were in the process of combining several databases into a single "MDB" – Marketing Database. I was taking customer data from one of the old databases and putting it into the new one. One customer at a time…

I would drive to the office (arriving later and leaving earlier than my dad), but when my car was having issues getting through its MOT, I had to get a lift in with him. On the way home, he was telling me about his day - trying to close a deal with a big customer who they were trying to sell a computer system to – years before he had sold them a printer system as one of his first big wins, so he was personally invested in this pitch – who was probably going to go with a Microsoft system instead. The thing he was frustrated about was that the client was keen on the features of Xerox's networked system – the internet was still pretty novel³, but things like email were fairly well understood.

Xerox's system was fully networked from the start – different users' all used their own terminals (screen, keyboard, mouse) but were actually using the same computer; sharing files, sending messages was trivial, rather than PC-based systems that would either share file storage on a server or expose their whole file systems on the network. What that meant was that users on different terminals could edit the same documents, at the same time.

But Microsoft's salespeople were promising that those features would be coming soon – within the next couple of years, as part of a Windows update. My dad – a computer science graduate – found this hard to believe, and they had got some engineers from PARC involved to get their perspective. They did their analysis, and came back with the view was that there was absolutely no chance of Microsoft adding collaborative editing to Windows/MS Office in the next five years; the amount of engineering work involved to have anything close to what Xerox had working on networked PCs was enormous, and a realistic timeframe would be more like 20 years.

But – another valuable lesson I learned – customers tend to believe salespeople who tell them what they want to hear.

So – Xerox didn't win the contract, I went off to a different job once the data entry work was done, and then went off to university the next year, then joined the working world and started spending most of my working days in Microsoft Office, learning about the frustrations of how working with n people on a spreadsheet/Powerpoint file meant dealing with at least n+1 different versions of the same file (which by the 2010s just seemed like an inevitable way of working ) - when Microsoft released a new functionality in Office; if your files were saved in a Sharepoint folder, then more than one user could open and edit the same document, at the same time.

Almost exactly 20 years after PARC engineers had predicted it would be 20 years away – although about five years after Writely (who were bought by Google, and turned the product into Google Docs) made it possible on the web. I doubt that, had Google not made it available to Google Docs users, Microsoft wouldn't have seen the need to put the effort into developing as a native feature to the desktop Office applications.

But still - about 30 years after Xerox had been doing it. There's a reason why one of the best books about the history of Xerox was titled 'Fumbling the Future'…

The original link is now dead, but I copied the relevant passage in my Augmenting Human Intellect post ↩
Funnily enough, it is literally the other side of the street from where Google's main London office was (before they moved to Kings Cross). ↩
This was the summer of 1995 - Windows 95 was only a few months old. If you wanted a web browser, you first had to connect to the internet and download one. It wasn't easy… But the computers I was using in the Xerox office had web browsers and an internet connection - learning about them was a pivotal moment for me. But thats another story… ↩
"Forbidden Planet" - which is now at a much bigger location about a five minute walk away. ↩

Some Random Nerd