It's 2018 and folks are still stuck "collaborating" on documents by sharing them back and forth over email.

MS Word Doc created in Office 2016 will not open in Office 365.

THIS IS WHY GOOGLE IS WINNING!

isn't there a web version of MS word tho? aka the same thing as Google docs

@Stuxnet "same" is only true if all parties use the web version.

As soon as one person emails a copy, the entire collaborative environment falls apart.

@T3hbeowulf Well emailing a docx file wouldn't work with Google docs either.

You're pretty much blaming the company for the incompetency of their users. Not how it works.

Google docs is free(as in beer). Office365 is not. In order to get the collaborative features out of O365, all parties have to have paid for it. I work for a very large company, and we have not paid for it. We paid for Confluence. O365 is a neat idea, but its cost is keeping users from adopting it.

That's why Google is winning.

@bahua To use the web version of word, O365 doesn't appear to be necessary.

I just created a bullshit account and I was able to access it and share a link to allow access to edit.

I might be completely incorrect about this, but it's whatever. Doesn't really matter and the OP is all a matter of opinion.

The online version of MS Office is free aswell. You just need a Microsoft account.
And wtf I can open doc docx even with libre office how does that not work for 365 vs. 16? Is a mac involved?

Please let someone make an online libreoffice suite, so that hopefully Google will die.

Oh well, a man can dream.

Yeah, I had an innovative idea of a wysiwyg editor with save doc, share doc and other features years ago.... I thought I will be rich... then I was introduced to google docs

I see many of misleading things here:
- office 365 (it's desktop subscription suite) and can open office 2016 doc files (including the previous ones, i think they changed file format in 2007)
- office online, is the web version, is free and can open the new file format, if you try to open an old one, it can be converted and opened automatically
- office 2016, 365 and online support sharing and coedit

In last resort, you can use a Word File inside a git repo.