Realtime collab apps tend to kill their competitors without realtime collab. See Figma: slightly worse UX and performance compared to Sketch, easily killed Sketch. How did Notion penetrate the competitive docs/wiki market? Much more collaborative than the incumbent Confluence (now confluence is iterating on realtime collab to remain relevant).
Realtime is becoming table stakes in any online collab system. I think code is the exception, not the rule, because it’s 100x more brittle than prose or pixels that need to convey approximate meaning to humans.
You can implement realtime without using CRDT/OT, Notion is paragraph-by-paragraph last write wins, no fancy algo, but mostly good enough to remain competitive.
We used jira for live incident handling back in 2015 at a young company. It was horrendous. Multiple people would add roughly the same update at the same time. It wasn't until they refreshed jira that they'd see the duplicates. This led people to constantly refresh jira both before and after adding a comment. I still remember two people adding the same comment, refreshing together and both deleting their own comments after refreshing and seeing the duplicate. (Found this out after the incident during one of those "what could have gone better?" conversations). We switched very quickly to using Google Docs for documenting the live incident and simply attached that doc to the jira ticket at the end. It sucked badly and made a lot of people hate jira.
As soon as Slack became a thing at our company we immediately switched to using it for realtime incident updates, because Google Docs was unsuitable for a bunch of other reasons. And we wrote some automation around creating a jira ticket, creating a slack channel using the ticket name, and updating the jira ticket with a link to the ongoing incident). At the end of an incident when the jira ticket got moved to "resolved" the slack channel would get archived. Extremely simple and effective.
You are absolutely right. I am in the minority, no doubt. My POV is that standard corporate realtime collaboration is generally a waste of time, personally. Or at the very least, the results always reek of design-by-committee - inconsistencies and compromises. This is independent of tech, and I would say the same about the 2000s white boarding and mindmapping. Sometimes, there are cases where it works, like an 1:1 session with someone you can really vibe with. But even in those cases, it’s usually better with single-control (ie only one person editing at a time).
I’m perfectly fine talking about work on a high level, but when it gets too gritty it’s usually better to sit down in quiet and solve the problem or improve the design on your own. (Needless to say, I did not exactly thrive in a corporate environment.)
So to me realtime collab can be very neat, but it’s not a common enough use-case to be a dealbreaker. That said, there’s tremendous value in being able to easily view, comment, duplicate, copy the latest version that others publish, in read-only mode. Perhaps the success of Figma etc is partly also because of that?
Realtime is becoming table stakes in any online collab system. I think code is the exception, not the rule, because it’s 100x more brittle than prose or pixels that need to convey approximate meaning to humans.
You can implement realtime without using CRDT/OT, Notion is paragraph-by-paragraph last write wins, no fancy algo, but mostly good enough to remain competitive.