Indeed, how many people when they write such a thing spend time when proofreading it to think about whether it would engender any sort of warm feeling in the audience at all. If it doesn't, then I'm afraid it doesn't hit the spot, and was probably a waste of time. Writing stuff, however erudite the content, is a total waste of time if the audience doesn't get some value, and hopefully the intended value. Even this article comes under that objective.

Compare that Word document with the article you're reading. Starts on page 1, at the top. Goes on a bit, and you then click for more. You get another Web page (notice, by the way, how the paper paradigm has even invaded the Web). Wanna actually print it? Wow, "pages" are gone completely. DominoPower's Web site reformats it for you as a single chunk of content, right across the screen. Your browser and display adapter decides the details of how to display it. If you actually hit Print, your browser and printer then decide how it hits the paper.

It's displayed on the screen optimised for the screen, and prints on the printer you choose and the paper you choose, optimised for that. The decisions are all made locally at your computer. Can't do that with Word; I have to write it in Word how I want it printed, and if you get a copy of the file, it prints using the decisions I made, not what's best for your kit. But I shouldn't have to care about your kit, especially if what I'm writing is words that communicate with other people, not words that I specifically want to get on to paper.

Now that we've seen that Word is fundamentally a glorified typewriter, let's look at collaboration. Collaboration is about sharing brain-power, with that sharing of intellectual creativity channelled via various communication means--voice, paper, email, shared documents, instant messaging, and quite often several of these at once. Collaboration requires that the communication channels assist and augment the human interactions.

What is collaboration really?
Collaboration is about sharing; it's not specifically about communication. Collaboration, by the way, isn't an end in itself. It's a way to harness the collective brainpower of a bunch of people, to deliver value to the enterprise that they're working for. It is an enabling tool for enterprise to do what it does, better, cheaper, with higher quality, than the next enterprise; or more bluntly, beat the competition.

What good collaboration tools do is provide mechanisms that enable the people in their company to share ideas and knowledge, and to build upon those ideas and knowledge to increase the expertise of the company as a whole, which makes it more fit to deal with whatever its customers and marketplace throw at it.

Communication is merely a mechanism to enable collaboration. Sharing files is not collaboration. Collaboration comes from sharing content. Word is not a communication tool per se. As we've seen, it's about producing paper. Sure, you can email Word documents about, or transfer them by file transfer, or even store them in Notes databases, but all you're doing is communicating the file, not sharing the content.