Using Microsoft Word with Git
My SaaS deals primarily with legal documents that for years had been maintained with Word. The pain of emailing documents is real, but the comfort level with how Word works is also real. Over the years, most organizations have developed internal workflows to share and send documents around that bypass the pains, and while they may not be perfect, they work.<p>The funny thing is that the document authors like these ways of working. It is the tech people who don&#x27;t. I&#x27;ve seen &quot;Git for Word&quot; proposed many times a year for a while now. And all of the ideas are interesting, but none of them appeal to my audience because they don&#x27;t care about git&#x27;s feature set. Nobody wants to branch and merge. Nobody wants a straight version history. (&quot;Nobody&quot; meaning nobody in my market, not nobody in the world.)<p>They want a storytelling experience. They want to know the why, not the what. And the workflow tends to be unidirectional, not with collaborative changes coming back together, but with expanding changes as each person adds their ideas and makes change for a specific instance of using a document. The experience we build for them bring in pieces of version history, pieces of comments, pieces of telling the story of why something was done, so people down the line can have more context to decide whether to accept or reject the changes.<p>It isn&#x27;t that &quot;Git for Word&quot; is a bad idea - on the contrary, it would be great if someone pulls it off. My point is that building something that improves on Word isn&#x27;t actually about the software, it is about the document workflows. If you find groups who work like software devs do, where documents receive small updates from a team, and bring all changes together for a final product, there is probably a market. But when evaluating such ideas, there has to be a reality check of whether the actual use of the documents truly matches the use case for git.