It’s an extremely valuable solution to a very real problem. Surely you must have tried Google Docs? The “mboo” is an indication that the two editors have different ideas about where they’re going. In a typical setup both editors will see that someone else has their cursor in the same place in the document, and they will very quickly see that a conflict has happened. Now they can coordinate on how to resolve it. It’s not a problem, but a desirable step in the process of two people working together on something that isn’t finished.
I've seen all to often where people don't see the conflict because it allowed them to continue.
Such that editing a Google doc is easily up there with many other experiences I don't like. Taking the act of editing, that used to just be single user and forcing it into distributed tricks from the get go.
Yes, collaboration is distributed. And sometimes it is nice to both be working at the same place/time. Usually, though, a batch process is easier to reason about and execute.
A text editor could easily highlight passages where concurrent changes were made. (Perhaps only if a heuristic indicates that the merged change doesn’t make any sense.) The metadata is all there.
