As somebody who has worked full-time, over-time, and essentially in my sleep with Word files, PowerPoints, and highly sensitive bid documentation...yeah, I have to agree working in the cloud for this kind of stuff strikes me as career suicide. Maybe not in your turf, re: software development, but with respect to management, operations and marketing people, there should only be one person with the key to the kingdom. I'm not kidding about this, even if just talking internal development.
Also, this is why everything went out as a locked down PDF, unless explicitly mandated otherwise by RFP/etc specifications...and even then, Track Changes > Accept All Changes is gospel. Anybody in my line of work saw what the .GOV did with converting PDFs and simply redacting with a graphic over the text...yeah, that's why I'm a first-class proposal developer, because I've seen carnage yo.
Even if you are working on something that is not security/negotiation sensitive, this is still scary, and the layman can approximate it with Google docs document history and the like.
Document history enables thoughtcrime detection, especially as it becomes more and more atomic towards actual keystrokes. I wonder how long it will be until typed and deleted text is used as evidence in a court of law.
Or you could "Keep Calm and File > Make a copy..." of the Google Doc and share that instead of the original draft. The copy doesn't copy the version history.
This is personal experience, so I'm not trying to be intentionally glib. Maybe for one person. For distributing to two to five people, this is a terrible idea, because here's how Mr. Murphy rolls: As soon as you get edits from A, B, and C of the team back, and update the document and are ready to distribute another version, the last person Y will submit their content. Person Y's content edits something that Person B already edited. This kind of thing snowballs...hard. It's not about them seeing the past, it's about appropriate control for the future (aka the deadline).
I mean, I know how to really whip the donkey spit out of "Compare" and the available tools, but until you've seen just how sideways this stuff can go, there's always room for a professional pest...an expert Proposal Writer...there's so much learned in the trenches that we all have a certain cynicism built up, and that's the fuel that gets the junk in by deadline time.
Honestly the only way I've found to make this stuff work is to use something like LaTeX, where the source is a text-based format, and then put it in a real version control system like git, that has proper support for merging and resolving conflicts. Then when the document is correct you compile it to a PDF, and that's what you actually send out (bonus: much smaller file size than something like word).
(Of course, the big downside is that all your collaborators have to know LaTeX, and not use funny macros that the others don't understand)
As somebody who has worked full-time, over-time, and essentially in my sleep with Word files, PowerPoints, and highly sensitive bid documentation...yeah, I have to agree working in the cloud for this kind of stuff strikes me as career suicide. Maybe not in your turf, re: software development, but with respect to management, operations and marketing people, there should only be one person with the key to the kingdom. I'm not kidding about this, even if just talking internal development.
Also, this is why everything went out as a locked down PDF, unless explicitly mandated otherwise by RFP/etc specifications...and even then, Track Changes > Accept All Changes is gospel. Anybody in my line of work saw what the .GOV did with converting PDFs and simply redacting with a graphic over the text...yeah, that's why I'm a first-class proposal developer, because I've seen carnage yo.