&gt; <i>But you can save oh so much complexity by introducing a central point. I am, to be honest, extremely bewildered by Google&#x27;s decision to use OT for their Google Docs—a centralized system.</i><p>Could a reason be that Google Docs allows for offline editing (if you install the Chrome extension), making it easier to save all these changes at once when an internet connection returns? You mention later that OT doesn&#x27;t help when trying to merge conflicting edits (in which case Google Docs will spawn a &quot;&lt;collaborator&gt;&#x27;s conflicting copy of &lt;document name&gt;&quot;, IIRC). However, <i>if</i> this level of conflicting desynchronisation is rare, and <i>if</i> OT makes it easy to push large changes after editing the document offline for a while, they might have decided it was worth it.