

We're five members of the Google Docs team - ask us anything - jcorcuera
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hylnw/were_five_members_of_the_google_docs_team_ask_us/

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mattdeboard
Valuable morsel: Ctrl-F "ergobiblio" and just keep reading his replies.
They're the only ones worth bothering with.

Useless opinion: Not to throw in my lot with the most downvoted (and barely
visible) of comments here, but seriously, these "Ask us anything about our
product!" AMAs from big companies are uniformly marketing chaff. Total
yawnfest since no one dares answer challenging questions for fear of running
afoul of their legal team (or, in fact, the legal system down the road when
their words can be used against the company).

This rigidness makes this sort of "community outreach" exceedingly boring. In
my terrible, stupid opinion, companies worth asking questions of never have
time to get a bunch of managers, a PR/marketing person and a single engineer
together to answer only the most sycophantic or safe questions (again, I don't
blame them for being concerned with self protection).

Give me email responses from Gabe Newell to completely random gamers any day
over this sort of canned interaction.

~~~
jedc
I mentioned this down-thread, too, but while it might not be terribly useful
for any of us directly, the feedback the Docs team gets from users could be
very valuable when it comes to prioritizing development of new features.

So you could think of it as marketing chaff, or think of it as a product team
listening to their users. I'm an optimist so I choose the latter. :)

------
fudged
I'm really glad that companies, developers, etc. are using reddit as a
platform for discussion. The user base has some smart folks in it, and the
commenting system is fantastic for holding large intelligible discussions.

For instance, in the submission for Facebook's development on the Android
application, there was an entire thread with devices affected by a specific
bug.

Google seems to use reddit's commenting system far better than their own
"Google Moderator" (<http://www.google.com/moderator/#16/e=7f3> p.s. does
anyone know if any of these 3K+ questions were ever answered anywhere?)

------
Pewpewarrows
Probably the most important note to come out of this AMA: Offline Google Docs
is coming back later this summer. Offline apps in general is really going to
put a nice jump-start in the newly produced line of Chromebooks.

~~~
streeter
This was already announced during the Google I/O 2011 keynote. It seems
prudent now that Chromebooks are going to be shipping.

------
orofino
Sad I didn't see this earlier. Would love to see a couple issues addressed in
spreadsheets. Namely conditional formatting based on a formula and merging of
cells vertically.

~~~
gruseom
What do you like to use conditional formatting for?

~~~
orofino
Formatting like this is helpful for things like...

if cell < 0 make entire row red

This isn't currently possible because the conditional can only check the value
of THIS cell, not others. As the other comment indicates, it also helps expand
what values you can evaluate. I use excel heavily and this is one of the
largest gaps between it and google docs for me.

~~~
gruseom
I work on this kind of thing (not at Google) and your answer here is helpful.
If you'd be up for an offline discussion about other gaps between Excel and
web-based spreadsheets, please email me (address in profile).

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redthrowaway
Well, it seems the HN bump is enough to bring down reddit...

I kid, but it's sad that reddit is still so unreliable. It had a pretty good
run lately. I wonder how they're coming with the transition off Amazon EBS.

~~~
est
<http://redditincident.com/>

~~~
redthrowaway
I was getting "you broke reddit" pages when I tried to visit the link.

------
datagirl
Why didn't anyone ask any questions?

~~~
thesethings
I asked a question (and got it answered :D), and saw lots of other questions
in there. Were you expecting a bigger turnout?

~~~
radicaldreamer
I suspect the parent comment was just hacker news v reddit elitism flaring up.

------
forgotusername
We're five members of a sub-team of a sub-team of a large corporation whose
recent products are used solely due to the critical mass of users built around
the previous generation of our company's developers' products.

Herein we will pay lip service to a barely innovative also-ran office product
that happens to use a lot of complex JavaScript (which is fashionable),
answering any questions posed with vague responses whose only substance is an
alignment with our corporate goals. In truth we've probably spent the best
years of our lives fixing bugs relating to the pixel-perfect positioning of
the buttons in a particular form in the application.

Our motivation for writing this IAmA is most likely to convince ourselves that
despite our cog-like position in a massive corporation wherein our only career
path is sideways or into middle management, our jobs and lives have some
semblance of meaning, and have created significant value for the planet. If
upper level management approved our IAmA, they did so only for the goodwill
and free PR that may result from it.

In truth, we are but 5 representatives of a company whose massive weight is
being used to shape the future of the industry in ways favorable only to
itself and its stockholders, and deeply unfavorable to small, independently
controlled companies. Its recruitment drive has been turned so high in recent
years that the mere name-dropping of "Google" is unlikely to mean much with
regard to our individual skill-sets. We are mediocre developers with limited
vision, working for a company that chooses our direction for us. \--

I'm sorry for being so negative, but honestly there is almost nothing of value
to be derived from these kinds of posts, it's not like these guys are
authorized to tell us anything of substance with regard to future product
plans. Guaranteed 90% of the comments are feature requests and self-
congratulatory nonsense.

~~~
Pewpewarrows
Wow. Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.

If you bothered to actually look through some of the thread, it's actually a
pretty nice read. A good chunk of upcoming features and design decisions were
revealed, they took note of a number of feature requests, and some nice
personal questions were answered as well, putting a nice human face on some of
the invisible hands working on one of the world's largest online office
suites.

~~~
forgotusername
I'll admit to being in a slightly bad mood, but there are literally multitudes
of blogs dedicated to news about Google and preaching its praises.

I don't particularly consider this kind of endless, banal content centered
around a handful of behemoth companies and trendy news topics interesting,
especially with legitimately insightful articles buried in the new queue and
receiving hardly a click (example:
[https://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2011/06/09/09climatewire-
this-...](https://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2011/06/09/09climatewire-this-weeks-
solar-flare-illuminates-the-grids-63979.html) ).

If I tire day in, day out of reading the same rhetoric on Hacker News that I
can find covered on the BBC (e.g. the ~5 articles they currently have
dedicated to LulzSec on their technology home page, kids finding SQL
injections really classifies as content for a boutique technical news site?),
and can't respond with a little sarcasm, then perhaps HN isn't worth my time.

~~~
jamesaguilar
You will be deeply missed. It would be a shame if you spent the best years of
your life making cynical comments on HN.

