Isn't that just another point in his favor? It's easy to say "you're doing it wrong, just learn how to use these other technologies so Office works correctly", but most users would obviously prefer a product where "doing it right" is the default behavior. I'm speaking of course only with respect to the feature being discussed here (collaborative editing); I don't have much of an opinion on Office vs Drive overall.
Not really. It's a known problem since the dawn of computing: How do you control multiple users accessing a binary file cleanly over the network?
The solutions that are generally accepted as the right solutions are:
1. Version control systems. So in this case, SVN or Sharepoint (yes it is a version control system for documents).
2. Collaborative editing.
3. Synchronisation.
In favour of point 1 which I always suggest using, history is possible to tie to a user always, centrally controlled, archivable on your own site, actually really easy to manage and allows people to work entirely offline. It scales to mega-sized documents as well. Imagine our typical formal specs (sorry we're too finicky about quality to do agile) which are 200-280 pages long in Google Docs?
Point 2 can lead to odd corruption. If you've ever actually done any collaborative editing with 2 or more people on Google docs or dealt with the crock of shit that is Numbers or Pages and iCloud on the Mac you'll know where I'm coming from.
Point 3 is just the transport layer for 2 and 1. OneNote does this, very well.
So the point is moot. Just because it complains at you that you're doing it wrong, doesn't mean the technical solution doesn't require some work on your part.
