For whatever its worth, I worked near docs during that time, and that support note elides a lot of the launches that happened. The big focus during that time was on Office compatibility, and so there were a lot of investment in things that were not end-user visible, but allowed for better coexistence in mixed environments.
A massive launch in terms of impact and usage was the ability to directly edit word documents in docs instead of converting. This also extended to sheets and slides, and so was a major focus.
So - totally agree that there were not a lot of shiny user-facing features during that time, but there was a huge engineering investment going on based on a particular strategy that just didn't show itself sirectly in the UI.
Fair enough. But from an end-user perspective, I’ve been in multiple conversations where a topic was “can anybody remember the last time Google Docs launched a new feature?” and everybody was completely stumped and nobody could think of a single thing launched in years. When the company in question is Google that’s a very strong signal not to rely on that product being around much longer, which is why the state of Google Docs has been so confusing – clearly lost all momentum yet surprisingly not killed.
A massive launch in terms of impact and usage was the ability to directly edit word documents in docs instead of converting. This also extended to sheets and slides, and so was a major focus.
So - totally agree that there were not a lot of shiny user-facing features during that time, but there was a huge engineering investment going on based on a particular strategy that just didn't show itself sirectly in the UI.