In Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, Matthew G. To defamiliarize Google Docs’ influence, it might help to rewind the frame even further back to the time when another categorical jump happened: when word processors decimated typewriters.
#ASD GOOGLLE DOCS SOFTWARE#
Even after its ambition went limp, however, it has remained relevant and influential, a trendsetting piece of software that new generations copy from and try to dethrone.Īnd while its forerunner Microsoft Word was a qualitative improvement over older word processors like WordStar and WordPerfect-which Microsoft Word had decimated to consolidate the market-Google Docs was a categorically different product from word processors, one that made the term “word processor” sound quaint. So let’s begin from the end: The status of Google Docs today is like that of a long-tenured academic whose early ideas brought about a sea change in the field but who thereafter went on a lifelong sabbatical. It’s easy to locate its current place but more challenging to assess its original impact, because we’re just bad at remembering how life felt before transformational technologies. Released in 2005, Google Docs has long passed the magic phase and graduated into the boring phase, so critiquing it in 2023 feels both anachronistic and overdue. In fact, commercial aviation technology is so advanced that it made flying-a levitation trick if there ever was one-boring. Magic relies on the element of surprise, but the last thing you want on a transpacific flight is a surprise from the engine or a surprise passenger in the cockpit. But if you agree with Dan McKinley’s quietly influential essay “ Choose Boring Technology,” the desired end state of technologies isn’t to keep being magical but to become boring. The cliché has it that sufficiently advanced technologies are indistinguishable from magic.
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