Thinking about the Salesforce.com and Google announcement yesterday, one of the hot buttons was collaborative work on documents or presentations…
The ironic thing about switching to a SaaS version of your office applications is that while it would force people to work more collaboratively from the latest versions of your most important documents (which is good), the very thing that drives this collaborative work (being forced to work online) will keep it from getting on to the laptops of the road warriors and field personnel who could benefit most from a system like this.
And then, once Google Apps releases the "desktop" version of the product as they have promised which could be what wins over more users, people will go back to their old bad habits of just using what is already on their machine rather than going online for a more recent version of that document or presentation. And then the "collaboration" benefit is gone.
