Third party workflows like... Google Docs?

Like Salesforce

Yeah, I've been surprised to learn how DocuSign is used by some large corporations and government agencies. It's the system that manages all sorts of forms and workflows within the orgs, not just contracts going outside the org.

On the one hand this is true, however there's another side to this that makes it quite compelling.

IT sign-off and buying new IT services is hard in many large businesses. This means that it's almost always worth using a built-in feature of software you already have, than going for external software. Add to this the fact that companies almost never have one company account, each team re-buys the same software because services are hard, and the fact that most companies already use DocuSign matters a bit less.

Much of Slack's growth has been built on this[^1]. You can sign up for a free account and start inviting your immediate team. Paying for a small team is well under the typical auto-approved expenses limit, and when you've sunk your cost, got a bunch of people onboard, and proved the value, only then do you go to IT to get it rolled out across the business.

Individuals using this sort of thing, termed "shadow IT", is a good way to grow usage. This feature of docs seems well positioned to grow that way even if DocuSign is available.

[^1]: I worked on a team that was required by the business to use MS Teams. While we waited for the Teams workspace to be provisioned and all the authentication crap to be sorted out we signed up for Slack, invited everyone, and got work done for the 6 months it took to get a working Teams workspace.

DocuSign shmocusign. Digital signatures is the most bizarrely anachronistic technology on the Internet. Even credit card vendors gave up on signatures.

There's a difference between DocuSign signatures ("I agree to this contract/agreement") and credit card signatures ("Here's a scribble which is somehow unique to me.")

I would counterargue that the people who do use it (such as myself) find it a pain to switch between interfaces and will campaign to get DocuSign replaced. If switching over is less painful than that of using DocuSign, we will switch over. Most will put their daily workload above what's better for the company financially

Google won't release an "X-killer" until Google is broken up by anti-monopoly regulators. Until then, google will let millions of dollars of easy money go by in order to avoid giving regulators examples of google using it's control of the internet to replicate products and push the incumbent companies out of business. This is why all google features are half-baked and killed. Fear of regulators.