System Design: Google Docs

Problem statement

Imagine two students are preparing a report on a project they’ve just completed. Since the students live apart, the first student asks the second student to start writing the report, and the first student will improve the received copy. Although quite motivated, the students soon understand that such a collaboration is disorganized. The following illustration shows how tedious the process can get.

The scenario above is one example that leads to time wastage and frustration when users collaborate on a document by exchanging files with each other.

Google Docs

To combat the problem above, we can use an online collaborative document editing service like Google Docs. Some advantages of using an online document editing service instead of ...