Why I'm Not Switching to iCloud from Google Drive

Two words, really: Collaboration and Organization. I write quite a bit. Not "Stephen King" amounts but more than the average American. A big part of my writing process is working with others to edit my work. This works best with robust sharing and commenting systems. A second major part of my process is storing my documents. Folders are not just a way to find documents, but to store them in a way that doesn't jumble all of my documents together. Let's deal with the second part first:

With the release of Mavericks, Apple has continued the marginalization of the folder system. There. I said it. It is one of those things that have fallen by the wayside as Apple cuts away the cruft and tries to create a computing system that is digitally authentic. And sure, folders can be a pain. They have no business having their manila fingers all over the system. Apple's approach to applications is a perfect example. An app is not stored all over the file system when it is installed on a Mac. Instead, the app is stored in a single, neat package. Uninstalling entails dragging said package to the trash and emptying the trash.

So ditching folders in that instance makes sense and by eliminating folders as an interface metaphor Apple was able to create a system that translated beautifully when they developed iOS (if you want to see what happens when an operating system isn't set up to handle apps this way, dig up a Windows Mobile 6.5 device). But folders were never the right place for storing the tools that we work with, we don't keep our staplers in folders, why would we keep apps there?

In order to understand when folders are useful (because they certainly are), we need to look at where they came from. Folders, as most of us should well be aware, come from the murky world of office filing. As I alluded to above, folders hold documents, not tools. More importantly, folders hold the documents we're not working on at the moment. Folders keep related documents together and make those documents discoverable when someone needs to work on or reference one.

iWork for iCloud puts all of the users documents on a single page without providing any method for organization. Documents can be sorted by date or by name but not by subject, project or type. What sense does it make for my old job applications to share the same screen as all of my blog posts? Even the terrible tag method Apple introduced with Mavericks would work better than nothing. Without a way for me to organize my library of documents, iWork for iCloud is next to useless.

The second reason iCloud fails to fit my workflow is it's lack of collaboration features. Sharing a document and allowing others to edit (which iWork now allows)
is certainly useful, but my workflow includes sharing documents with an editor or receiving documents to edit so that they can be marked up and commented on. Apple will likely add to the collaboration features as they continue to update iWork for iCloud, but for now the lack of features for collaboration on documents makes it a non-starter.

With two major parts of my workflow either not fully featured or absent, iWork for iCloud is a complete no-go for me. While I love the design and layout of the web apps and dislike the aesthetics of Google Drive, I have to choose function over form at this point because the function so far off.