Long before clouds was a thing we had servers and local networks and shared drives. We still have servers and private vpns to connect to them to access shard drives.

But we used to have them too.

Sure, and maybe even some kind of suvversion system could lock one user out while the other is doing work, to avoid the kinds of conflicts that we’re talking about here.

All of that is a hard sell versus the experience of dropping into a document and seeing three cursors all entering data collaboratively, a la Google Sheets.

And I’m writing this to someone that’s trying to make myself at home using Grid raft, the vibecoded AI Slop Excel. If I had to share documents mid-production with anyone else at all, I would need something cloud-based.

I agree. “The cloud” is just the same shit but someone else is running it and it has a web based UI. There’s also ways to make libreoffice collaborative too hiw m365 office is. We don’t need it.

I called this over a decade ago. Embrace, extend, extinguish, now all the prices hike what seems like quarterly or biannually. Such a joke.

My org has been trying to shut off “the zed drive” (network mount) for like a decade and staff still hate Onedrive. If it was actually better, why would staff resist using it so much?

I 100% agree. But it didnt work like it does today.

You could not collab, because the software wasnt build to take advantage of shared drives, which will bring back all the following issues as before.

Best case is open source software with the same funtionality as Docs or Word, but you can hook it up to any servers at setup.

Build a Wireguard VPN inside the programs for making it just as easy for the masses to use them.

I dont want the “cloud”. I just want the same productivity.

There use to schemes to provide flexible locking to allow multiple people to edit documents located on the same local network. Never liked it nuch but others did. I expect that it is possible to develop and achieve shared documents and concurrent editing etc without Google. Maybe dust off old concepts etc.

The copies of same excel with a bit of change by different users on my sharepoint site disagrees.

Just use OVH cloud or some other EU one, what do you think?