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Collaboration in the Cloud at Google

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

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.