Google Docs vs. Word and OneDrive, who syncs better?

I’m sure many of us have stands regarding our favorite Office tools. Many of my friends are die-hard Google Docs fans who will get upset if you don’t want to use Google Docs or Google sheets when working with them. The conversation got so heated one time that I decided to make a blog post about it. Not necessarily to dispute who is superior, but why there is a difference.

https://aceits.net/microsoft-office-365-or-google-suite-which-is-best/

My current program offered free OneDrive and Office Suite as part of the windows service for our emails. (It’s funny because years ago my school used to use Google and then Microsoft offered a better deal, and recently they are having second thoughts about Windows Suite.) I want to narrow the scope of this post to Google Docs and Word on the cloud. Many of us have to work on Word synchronously, but many of us also faced problems when our work got deleted when we were working on the same document together. Why? It is the conflict resolution algorithm behind most of the sync services - Operational Transformation(OT).

The problem they’re trying to solve is phased like below:

If two clients change their documents such that they become out of sync, how do you bring them back to the same state while preserving both changes in a meaningful way? In comparison, it is easy to adjust the index of a single insertion operation on client A because of a deletion from client B, and then share this adjusted operation with client B so that both clients' documents are in the same state.

In English, it's an intelligent way to solve conflict when you and your friend Alice are trying to edit the same Google Doc.

Without diving too deep into the technical part of the organization, the problem really comes to something that had existed for a long time - file comparison. It might have been used wider than you imagined and older than many of us. The basic principles could have been applied to Dropbox, GitHub and others.

Going back to the Word vs. Google Doc sync question, one possibility that caused the difference is that the underlying tools are architected differently: Microsoft has a couple of software that can perform synchronization - Microsoft ActiveSync, Windows Mobile Device Center, and Microsoft Sync Framework. Google didn’t open source what they use, but there are a couple of open source projects written in Go that support Google Drive such as Rclone.

If you were going to ask my unprofessional opinion on which one is better, they are both great tools. Personally, I prefer the G suite for day-to-day tasks.