Comment by NetMageSCW
2 hours ago
Unless Microsoft complete re-wrote Office to add Sharepoint collaboration features, they seem to have managed it.
2 hours ago
Unless Microsoft complete re-wrote Office to add Sharepoint collaboration features, they seem to have managed it.
I would not be surprised to learn that substantial parts of the core of Office were rewritten to make that possible. Unlike Collabora/LibreOffice, Microsoft is one of the most well-resourced organizations in the world and can afford to do that kind of colossally expensive project. Of course, they'd need an extremely compelling reason to do so, but Google Docs was an existential threat to their market share.
Also, other commenters report that the real-time collaborative editing experience in Office is more sluggish than in Google Docs, and this is consistent with my own admittedly very limited anecdotal experience, and if this has persisted for years it may well be for deep architectual reasons.
Office for web and desktop office were literally separate teams, in separate locations, when I worked there. Complete separation unified only by a document output.