What we want to share and work with directly is the content. Emailing Word files around just distributes duplicates, with no control over divergent copies. It actually encourages chaos, which is the opposite of collaboration.

Word is its own worst enemy in other ways, too. It's far richer than is required for any sort of online collaboration. That's because, again, it's designed to generate paper. Coming back to the kind of documents we see every day in corporate life, how many of them major in the way the words are presented, rather than on the words themselves? To share ideas and proposals in words, we don't really need half, or even 90% of the functionality that Word provides.

All we need is something that enables us to enter the words, manage a few fonts and maybe some colour, and be able to do paragraphs, indentations, maybe lists, and I guess have a spell checker. Tables are pretty useful, and the ability to include pictures and links is nice. But anything else? Luxury. Look again at the way this article is presented in DominoPower. See anything fancy? No. Does that detract from the power of the words? No. At least, I hope not! So reserve Word for the few documents that actually need to hit paper, and use something simpler for the bulk of real collaboration.

There's more--file bloat. Another Word document that floated past me while I was writing this piece was a meeting agenda with a few notes. The document attachment that was emailed was 92k in size. I imported it into a Notes document, which came to 13k. The document has 568 words and 3294 characters (including the spaces), and contains all this in a table.

Assuming the table was necessary, there's still a fair amount of unnecessary content floating about, even in Notes, let alone in Word. And that's apart from all the hassle involved in having to open the email and then open the attachment, whereas as a Notes document I just open it directly from the view/inbox or wherever, and I can reply, copy to a calendar entry, or reply with direct annotations quite easily. MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) makes sure the annotations I make with the Notes permanent pen turn up in someone else's inbox in the same colour that I used, even if they don't use Notes. What could be easier than that?

So what have we concluded? Well, firstly that Word is basically a typewriter. Unfortunately, it's a ubiquitous typewriter. Everybody has one, which itself is a large part of the problem. Next, we've seen that corporate use of Word tends to reinforce the typewriter metaphor, by generating documents that only work when printed. We've seen how companies tend to encourage the mindset of completing Word documents with often inappropriate templates, rather than thinking about what the intended reader needs to get from the words that go into the document, and what really is the best way of getting the ideas and knowledge over to the audience.

We've also discussed collaboration, and how that differs from mere sharing of files. We've pointed out that collaboration is about ideas and knowledge, and the active sharing and working with that content. Note the word "active" in that sentence; collaboration is about discussion and building on ideas and knowledge much more than it's about plain dissemination.