Collaboration in the Cloud at Google

Diane Lambert
Makoto Uchida
Nicolas Remy
research.google.com (2014), pp. 1-13
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Abstract

Through a detailed analysis of logs of activity for
all Google employees, this paper shows how the
Google Docs suite (documents, spreadsheets and
slides) enables and increases collaboration within
Google. In particular, visualization and analysis
of the evolution of Google’s collaboration network show that new employees, have started collaborating more quickly and with more people as usage of Docs has grown. Over the last two years, the percentage of new employees who collaborate on Docs per month has risen from 70% to 90% and the percentage who collaborate with more than two people has doubled from 35% to 70%. Moreover, the culture of collaboration has become more open, with public sharing within Google overtaking private sharing.