Also in the industry. My bet is on all of them. Some people prefer block based, some prefer text, some prefer Markdown, some don't care. Writing a book on Notion is impossible for now, but building beautiful pages is much easier in Notion.

Microsoft and Google (And Atlassian) have all adopted the same strategy which is "Look more like Notion".

I don't think that Microsoft should be worried about Notion. But things are different with Google Docs, which is really threaten by Notion. At the end of the day, most Google docs can be created in Notion without any difference, and I actually doubt Google docs will be able to evolve enough to prevent that.

The strongest advantage of Notion compared to Google docs is not its text editor but it is his list feature. And there are a lot of list porn people. When you have 10% of your workforce being "hardcore list porn people" and 90% of the others being "dont care people". Then it makes sense that the full organization goes closer and closer to Notion

EDIT: "porn list" -> "list porn"

I'd agree with you, and add that there are are a lot of other details that make Notion nicer to use. We made the move from Docs to Notion at work a year or two ago, and I've recently switched for personal use as well. Some of the differences are power-user things (e.g. easier to manage certain types of formatting from the keyboard), but a big thing for me is that Notion makes it a lot easier to manage multiple pages. Both the left-hand navigation list, and the ability to nest pages, are game changers when you're trying to manage a large collection of information.

Also Notion just feels cleaner; I haven't really tried to analyze why. And it seems like pages load faster, though I'm not sure whether this is literally true or just something about the experience makes it seem that way. Either way, it makes a difference.

As a word processor, Notion is still pretty immature. It's not very good at handling cross-block selections, using cut/paste to manipulate bullet lists often results in a dropped bullet, etc. There are a lot of little fit-and-finish touches that are table stakes for a mature word processor, but don't seem to be a focus for Notion. I'm hoping, but not confident, this will improve over time. Docs is better at this (ever since they threw away our our original hacky contenteditable code and built the entire editing experience in JavaScript), but that's not enough to make me switch back from Notion, just enough to make me wish Notion would put some energy into this.

I’m interested to try Google’s new tables product when I get a chance.

A couple of months ago, I got a Apple M1 and a lot of these electron apps load much snappier. (Slightly impractical fix)

I'm not in the business but I did once spend two weeks of my life QA'ing just bulleted list copy-paste edge cases for a content-editable based WYSIWYG wiki editor and I would like that time back thank you very much.

There are fewer formatting options, but the options given are very opinionated. It is also really good at responsiveness to screen size.

Let's say, text editors. In the last 2-3 years we have been told AI driven auto-complete or code companions will "disrupt" the entire experience of writing text and code. Before that we had the plugin saga of VSCode and Jetbrains and what not telling us more features means more convenience. Before that we had GUI and cursor based text editors that were simple to use. Before that we had VI and emacs.

But is there any kind disruption? Not really. People still like what the use and feel comfortable with. They don't need to switch environments but they can comfortably add features that they think is necessary. For people who are comfortable with Vi text editor the process is Vi > VIM > Neovim and not Vi > Notepad++ > VSCode > Github Copilot.

I would say the other way around though, i.e. "list porn people".

It feels like Notion's demographic just dont need to share documents as documents. Notion would likely have put more effort into that feature if they did.

Ah well, I built it in my first week or so as part of a hiring trial process, back when the company was 16 people in a remodeled auto body shop. Before that, the “PDF Export” feature just opened the browser print dialog.

One fun thing about working at a startup is that you solve a problem for 90% of your users, but after a while of user growth and demographic shift, that remaining 10% ends up being bigger than the original 90% was in raw numbers.

https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1103069853252911104

It sure would be nice if I could make all pages "small text" and "full width".

Sharing has been done in two ways as far as I remember: straight making the page public when it was open information, or using Notion as a common draft and reformatting the text in Docs (+ adding headers etc.) before sending it to the partner.

I think instinctively anything “serious”, like a legal contract for instance, goes into Docs, even if Notion or another tool is used as a first step for collaboration.

One of my clients wants it for everything (typically text, stats, and graphs), and typically views it as just an "add a button" sort of feature, when it winds up being a "reimplement the layout in a different language" sort of thing. (leaving apart the thing where basically they want a gigantic lovecrafian horror of an excel file translated to the web)

PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference of a document. Even if it's not printed, it's something that people want.

I completely agree. Having the ability to look at what a dynamic document looked like at a particular moment in time (and be able to archive it), is a very important feature. In a dynamic document like Notion, people will still want to know what the data/doc looked like when decisions are made. Page-based layouts make this much easier.

It isn’t just the ability to have temporal addressability (if I’m using the word the same way as you). I don’t really care if I can time machine back to see how a notion document looked two weeks ago. I need the ability to archive that document, save it outside of notion, send it to my client, etc. You can do this with many different formats, and could also export JSON objects if necessary.

However, when it comes to mixing layout and data, PDF is a pretty good format that has good existing tooling.

So, it’s not entirely orthogonal… it’s not just about recording state in time. You have to be able to share it in a meaningful format — independent of the original application.

I suddenly realised I was reinventing HTML!

Just allow people to export HTML/CSS for archival.

Plenty of software can edit pdfs. I have used affinity designer in past to fix up issues in PDFs received from designers.

Seems like this can be better addressed by versioning and audit logs or checksums.

Notion could implement a feature like "permalink to the content as it was at this point in time". Maybe they already have. But for me to be sure that's an immutable record, I at least have to trust Notion.

I don't see where checksums come into it - either I trust Notion to tell me I'm getting the same document we agreed on, or I need to be able to download the document in a readable form and compute the hash on my client. In which case we're back at PDF again.

It doesn't need to be optimized, but it should be possible to achieve things like static PDF or printout.

Is it becoming niche? Yeah, probably, but we might want to think of it as being niche in the way that accessibility features are niche.

Anytime I need to read big documents I just export them and put it on it. Easy for the eyes and easy to take note on the document.

Also, when sending something to a client, it’s way more professional to send them a pdf document as an attachment they can open right in their browser instead of some obscure google docs / notion link.

Seems like it's touted as an innovation, but the only thing I see is that page breaks are gone.

Which isn't bad, I mostly use Google docs for online articles and to maintain a todo list, so things are now a bit cleaner.

But it doesn't seem like a big change...

So I can see this change having a big effect on consumers. If by "how big a change" you meant "would anyone even care", I think people will care, yes. Including me.

How big a change was it to implement? I don't know.

Note in addition to not having page breaks, it appears to have several "responsive" features added too (from the OP description, I haven't played with it yet myself). Lines wrap at whatever your screen size is (including zoom level), and there is apparently some screen-size-responsiveness to at least some images too.

I couldn't say how difficult this was to implement, having no idea what the code is like, and knowing that large legacy codebases can make naive predictions of how difficult a given change might be unreliable.

But I don't understand why.

So yeah, I welcome this change big time.

Limiting my docs to a IRL format doesn't make much sense to me, page breaks make no sense, with H1/H2/H3 etc you can just navigate the doc that way, and internal links work etc. No need to say "check out the flurple widget subsection on page 92" you just slack/email them the link to the subheader or H3 or whatever and bam they're there reading what you need them to look at, similar to markdown docs on github, but with all the manual formating GUI'd away.

No connection to Zoho other than being a happy mail customer

We do have paid plans in case you need to onboard a team and want access to a bunch of other apps as well - https://www.zoho.com/in/workplace/

I recently signed up for Zoho mail hosting, after Google announced the sunsetting for their legacy free customers. But the mail plans don't come with WorkDrive access. So even though I'm a paying customer to get IMAP access, I haven't really touched any of the Zoho office suite apps yet because I simply don't understand what my caps and limitations are.

https://www.zoho.com/workdrive/pricing.html

https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html

https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/

One piece of UX/design feedback -- the red color on 'START WRITING" triggers an automatic response that I've done something wrong or that a site is trying to warn me about something. I don't think a lighter shade/different color would trigger the same response

My selfish reason: take the most popular paper format - PDF. A PDF created thirty years ago, is viewable today and will be preserved intact and viewable thirty years from now. I won't be able to say the same about a Coda or Notion doc. With all that dynamic blocks pulling data from all over the internet, I don't even think it's possible.

I would love to meet these mythical legal professionals that use anything other than track changes in docx. :D

EDIT: parents -> patents

I feel for you, my kids have two US parents and they find them to be quite the pain in the ass. :-)

eg. I print / save websites' ToS to PDF all the time. Over the last few years (especially from Chrome) the result looks increasingly garbled, nothing like what's on my screen. God forbid figuring out how to produce them as exhibits for litigation.

Paper-sized, static content also tends to be a convient dimension for reviewing material of substance (eg. think academic papers).

Often during tax season, or when reviewing database models or complex business logic workflows I'll print the spreadsheets / ERM / flowcharts across large 11x17 sheets that get tiled up on the walls or littered across the floor effectively giving me infinite screen space. Humans are built for working spatially like this rather than clicking back and forth endlessly between tabs. (And incidentally, coworkers have been amazed how much more efficient we become being able to crowd around such an exposition together). I'll keep doing that until wall-sized, surround-you-on-four-sides touchscreens become commonplace (or VR ergonomic enough you can't tell you're in it) along with annotation tools that match the intuitiveness of cutouts and sticky tape.

And if I have to read hundreds of pages worth of literature I still prefer to do it on paper and save myself the eyestrain.

Not bashing the new tech, it sounds cool, I just fear it will make rendering to more traditional layouts more difficult.

I implemented the full Zoho suite a couple times at different companies, in 2016 and 2018-2019.

What hurt most are the endless papercuts on the core CRM tool. Ultimately the pains for my users weren't worth it.

I haven't used the Mail app. My teams used Google Workspace for email etc.

Try to open a Word document with a zip program, all you will see is a lot of folders with XML and blob images.

Latex and Word is XML. Notion is database.

The benefit of database: History, scale better, multiple users, merge text as diff is simpler +++

But assuming you're trying to maintain the tree structure you still have many of the same issues. Each node will need to entail the context of its parent, which means that you'll need to know things like transitive closures in order to know if a parent node affects a child (e.g. deletion) or if a child affects a parent (e.g. re-render tree). Or if you move a node do you have to re-create pointers below it? And tracking history could get complicated because it might span both the content of the node and the tree structure metadata (e.g. can you undo a change where the text was bold and a block was moved around). Where do you put transactions?

I'm not saying this is the same as XML, just that you can't magically escape all of the downsides. It's a fun problem to solve!

A bag of XML bytes doesn't give you that. It takes, at best, a SAX parser to do an O(n) scan through the whole document to find stuff. Most DOM implementations give you O(1) indexing by ID, but they require you to parse it first, and that's going to take O(n).

While creating and editing a database, it is SOP to create/maintain and save data structures that provide fast access later.

Is there some reason why you couldn't do the same for XML?

A database like SQLite allows you to perform structured queries at faster-than-O(n) speed straight off the disk.

A database isn't a set of flat-file CSVs even though that's all that is actually needed to do everything that people do with databases (albeit one operation at a time). (The data may be normalized but the datastructures aren't necessarily.) Instead, a database is data together with some data structures (and relevant code) that are maintained to speed up operations on said data.

Why can't one persist auxillary datastructures for XML, including (but not limited to) the DOM?

It doesn't really feel that impressive or new age to include a basic and imo required feature from the competitor so very very late!

Is there some sort of consensus on why Google hasnt really made a real effort to compete with MS Office?

It seems the "live recompute everything" ala Brett Victor (and previous) is spreading, do you agree ??