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Google Apps Refresh Sets Up Deathmatch With Microsoft: Page 5 of 6

Google also decided that, with today's high-performance networks and browsers (particularly the JavaScript engines), now was the time to move to a model of real-time collaboration. This is where, regardless of what device you or they are on, the people you're sharing a word processing document with can see where exactly in the document your cursor is (you can see theirs, too) and what you're typing, character by character, second by second.

To give you some idea of what this involves: Google has written Ajax code that essentially autosaves a document every second and then replicates those saves to the browsers of everyone else who is simultaneously working with the document. And not just in one direction. Everything that everyone is typing into the document is being centrally saved and replicated out to everyone else every 1 to 2 seconds. And it does this across the four major desktop browsers (unfortunately, not Opera).

With the old version of Google Docs, this degree of synchronization usually took 10 seconds or more. Describing those 10 seconds the way the telecommunications industry used to describe the proverbial "last mile," Harris and Lemonik say it was the hardest challenge the engineers faced.

According to Lemonik, "The hard problem that we solved was the ability to have the kind of data model that is elastic and flexible and that we could make it extremely generic so that we could have any content type to sort of be represented in this elastic data model. So it was hard enough to get it to work just for one data type. But getting it to work for several different complex data types that had very little relationship with each other -- that was a truly hard problem that's taken us a number of years." Said Harris of the challenge in my interview with him, "That 10 seconds was really hard. The product you're seeing right now is a rewrite from almost the beginning."

Using Safari on a Mac, I used the new Google Documents to write columns from my home office in Northern Massachusetts. And as I tapped on my keyboard, InformationWeek editor Chris Murphy using Firefox on a Mac was only a second or two behind in reading back to me over the telephone what I was typing. Collaboratively speaking, it was like breathing pure oxygen. As I typed in one part of the document, Chris typed in others and we both watched what the other was doing, easily avoiding "stepping" on each other.

Google's real-time technology breaks through not one, but two glass ceilings. The first involves the reconciliation engines that many of today's collaborative solutions use to sync and resolve the differences between the changes that two or more people have made to a document. With collaboration happening in real time, the need for such engines, which are fallible anyway, is completely eliminated.

The second technology Google's invention impacts has to do with screen sharing. Before this version of Google Apps came along, this easiest way to share documents in real time was through screen-sharing technologies like Cisco WebEx and Microsoft NetMeeting. Well, for Office documents, Google just obliterated those, too.