I’m a developer working at a company that uses GSuite. My personal feelings about trusting Google aren’t really relevant, I’d love to use Markdown in GDoc, as would many of my coworkers!

I'd be happy if only they supported the CommonMark format properly in GChat..

There are dozens of you.

Outside of HN, people that actually avoid giving Google any data are almost nonexistent. People that use Markdown definitely aren't. There's a huge number of pragmatic developers that use Markdown and Google.

Seems like people can't fathom that "developers" in general are an insignificant demographic. Google Drive is used by a billion or more (including most Android users).

Developers are a handful of millions. Developers that use markdown outside of where they're forced to and actively want Google Drive to support it are even fewer.

Apologies, that part was primarily intended for home users. Google certainly isn't targeting that demographic, there are much larger ones to go after.

If you're forced to use Drive at work, Google isn't targeting you either. It's targeting the C-suites above you who buy the software, and they don't know what Markdown is. The fact that engineers are lamenting the lack of Markdown in Google Drive shows how much influence they have over those decisions.

>Agree completely with the first paragraph and disagree completely with the second paragraph. There are lots of us who use Google drive at work that love md.

That's not incompatible with the demographic being vanishingly small and not who Drive is targeting at all.

"A lot of us" can still be an insignificant number compared to the Google Drive userbase and target demographic.

Now, "more than 10% of Google Drive users" might start getting somewhere. But I doubt it's even close to 1%.

I've seen virtually no use of Google Drive in the wild in my personal life. I've worked at 10k+ orgs that use it exclusively and every minute of every day.

I'm not sure where you're getting those stats but a source would be nice. I would suspect that their customer base and/or core usage is made up of far more tech company employees via Cloud and Workspaces than it is average Joes backing up documents.

>I've seen virtually no use of Google Drive in the wild in my personal life

That's what I call a bubble.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/25/17613442/google-drive-one...

And that's in 2023.

As for the numbers of organizational paying users in 2023 (corporate users) were 6 million, compared to "over a billion" (in 2023). And of those 6 million organizational users of course only a smaller share are developers. Regular file sharing and G-suite stuff for office workers is the order of the day.

> I've seen virtually no use of Google Drive in the wild in my personal life.

Really? I'm curious, are the people you know using Dropbox, OneDrive, or something else? Or are they just not sharing files in a public cloud?

I started to retort "how do you even collaborate on spreadsheets with your friends?" before realizing maybe I just have some, err, unique friend groups.

Our friend group also use spreadsheets to decide who is bringing what to the BBQ.

In the non tech-centric groups of friends and family, filesystem solutions have been superceded by all-in-ones like Google/Apple Photos, Notes etc.

Most people I know also use an iPhone meaning they're driven towards data storage that is built around an app use case, rather than simulating a desktop FS on another device.

Many of them use Google or Microsoft solutions for work though.