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Comment by pletnes | Hacker News Reader

Happy sharelatex user here. I'd say one of the essential advantages is rock solid simultaneous editing. I converted a couple of word users and they were instantly hooked. On a tight deadline, no less! Saved our ass in the end - the slowness of working serially in word would have meant missing the deadline.

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I highly prefer LaTeX (and Markdown via pandoc) for writing, but Word does not require you to work serially. If you store a document on OneDrive (or SharePoint I guess), you can edit a document with multiple people simultaneously. Both from Word Online and Word on your PC/Mac.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Collaborate-on-Word...

We've tried using it, as have other peopke I know. There are serious limitations to it. In practice I'd call it vapourware. Sharelatex delivers. In a SW dev team, markdown/latex+git also works great.

Neither does markdown. Just put it in a git repo.

Multiple authors collaborating on documents seems to work pretty well on SharePoint Online and the latest version of Word - I did have some problems with this in the past but seems pretty solid now.

NB I do prefer working with something like git - but for collaborating with people who are never going to use git (even with a GUI) - particularly sales and marketing folks - it is very useful.

There's a huge difference between "use this specific cloud service" and "use anything that can diff text".

"use this specific cloud service" that most large companies and universities are adopting. And with a GUI that's much more familiar to non-programmers.

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