It's a fantastic product for locking the organizational knowledge of countless teams in the data centres of the biggest (publicly traded) enemy to privacy the US has ever seen. This would be a disaster for science, would suck the life out of the TeX ecosystem, and would be a perfect acquisition target for evil science publishing parasites (you know the names) to further strangle the scholarly discourse in the name of convenience. If the files don't live in my hard drive and aren't published to my web server, I don't want it and will fight against it.

And before someone asks, yes, I feel similarly about GitHub, and wasn't the least bit surprised when it sold itself to the self-declared enemy of open source of previous decades (now reformed, of course!).

Yes, these things are convenient, they have great UX nudging you toward what serves the interests of whoever owns them. I'm not arguing against the usability of Google Docs but against transplanting that model to a community built on entirely different principles.

OK - thanks for clarifying! I was wondering if there was some objection beyond privacy and control (which are certainly sufficient in-and-of themselves!).

> evil science publishing parasites (you know the names)

Not being part of the scientific community, I don't - but I trust you that they exist!

2 things, 1) Why do you consider Google Docs to be any different than Word? They both serve the same market, so you might as well be asking why not standardize around Word. And 2) given the intended uses of Google Docs/Word, the biggest reason not to use it for research are exactly the set of asides you mentioned.

That seems irrelevant in this context as both Microsoft Word or Google Docs would fit the analogy in the same way.

> you might as well be asking why not standardize around Word.

The comment I was replying to specifically called out Google Docs as bad, so that was what I was referring to. I agree that they appear to have mostly-similar features (though, to me as someone who doesn't use either as a Power User, GD seems to be more focused on online collaboration, and MW on local editing, the output of which is then shared)