I guess most users of Google Docs have no use for this, especially the download as markdown. I wonder why they decided to add this feature for the tech crowd so late in the lifecycle of the product, feels almost like an Summer '24 intern project?
Agreed; given the timing, an intern project seems plausible. (It feels a bit more ambitious than a typical intern project though, and I'm not sure how many of those end up quite so user-facing.)
I can imagine one internal use case.
At Google, we use Google Docs heavily for design docs. After the system has been built, it's not uncommon to link to the design doc as supplementary reading material. But the design doc isn't intended to co-evolve with the system; at some point, we migrate the design details to our internal documentation pages (g3doc [0]), which serves version-controlled markdown files and often has a much lower barrier to entry.
Even though Google Docs is ostensibly collaborative, design docs are often used as a snapshot of an individual's engineering maturity as justification during performance evaluation and promotion, and so it's not typical for them to be updated substantially, years after the initial implementation is complete.
Speaking as someone with experience in enterprise software, I'd say there's a good chance it's because one or more large corporations were ready to migrate from MS Office to Google Workspace but that not having Markdown import/export would be a deal-breaker.
A lot of times when you wonder, "why did they add that feature?", that's why. A single large potential customer absolutely needed it because of whatever critical internal business processes they happen to have.
It's a major difference from software sold to consumers, where the aggregate consumer demand for a feature is generally more obvious/intuitive/explainable.
Collaborative editing of Markdown docs in GitHub / GitLab can be a pain. This is a huge game changer for technical writers. Admittedly not the biggest crowd, but hey...
