[nickbw]

Thanks for the feedback!

The screencast sucks. We know it, and we're in the middle of redoing it. We threw it together quickly because we'd heard from a few people who wanted to demo the service to bosses or co-workers, but thought signing up for a test account was too much effort or "commitment". We want to get people over that activation barrier.

Suppose we had an extremely short video that showed only the live multi-user editing, and ignored the permissions and revision control features. If you were a business with a use for a collaborative editor, would that be compelling enough for you to sign up and try it out?

For people who want "MS Word, online" Google Docs basically has it covered. We don't want all those Word features -- we just want live sharing that isn't painful, which is the one thing GD doesn't manage. I take your point, though, that we're trying too hard to emphasize our own feature list.

[anamax]

What if I want "shared MS Word" (presumably online) or "collaborative MS Word docs"?

If signing up is complicated enough that a video is a reasonable way to explain it, the signup process is broken. Why not fix it instead of explaining it better?

Why have sign-up at all? Why not let new users "start a doc and tell people about it", which should be very simple. After they've established that they can do what they want, biz users will then ask "how do I protect my docs?".