David Sparks on iWork Collaboration in the iCloud

David Sparks on iWork Collaboration in the iCloud

I tried using this feature with my coworkers shortly after it became available, last year. I was editing a document in Mac Pages and they were looking at it on the web as we talked on a conference call. Even with only one person editing (me), they still got conflict dialogs every 30 seconds or so and keep reloading the web page just to keep seeing the changes I was making.

I couldn’t believe that Apple had shipped such a broken product. Needless to say, none of my coworkers were interested in trying it again after that. Sounds like it hasn’t gotten any better.

For a pretty great alternative, try Quip. It’s been near-flawless for me, and has clients on web, iOS and Android. (It only does word processing, not spreadsheets.) I’m going to be so sad when they inevitably sell out to Google.