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> Google Docs are still files. It's just up to the author (or even the readers) to keep copies outside of Google's servers.

No they're not? You literally can't have a google doc as a file in a first-class way - you can export it to a file, but that's a lossy process.



Yup. Another way to say it is Google will release a file format the day offline computing drops dead. It should probably amount to an antitrust case or at least a major class action claim at this point. That said, even with PDF specs it's freakin impossible to read/write that format in an intelligible way, if the person creating the document used even the barest amount of block alignment. Adobe started with an innovative notion about layout, but ended up making content extremely hard to parse, and actually tried to open source the engine. Google started with an idea of trapping everyone's data in a format they'd never make fully available, and then charging for the privilege of storing it.




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