Multiplayer Software

Applications built from the ground up for real-time simultaneous editing by multiple users, where the document lives on a server rather than as a file on a local disk. Products like Figma and Google Docs exemplify the approach: no downloadable file, no offline editing, but seamless concurrent collaboration. This architecture is fundamentally incompatible with legacy file-based software — you cannot bolt multiplayer onto Photoshop, you must rebuild from scratch. “Multiplayer collaboration is the future of all applications” — the thesis that justified Adobe’s $20B Figma acquisition. See Collaborative Software.

Where this appears

• I’m Not Surprised That Adobe… (tweet)