[pknight]

That's nonsense. Their are whole industries that could use better collaborative tools (such as the book publishing industry). Have you tried writing a book? The tools are so limited.

Google docs for example is not a great tool for writing books, in fact there are very few tools that are particularly nice to use that are web based and strong on the collaborative front.

I think the problem perhaps with Editorially is too much pressure to get things going early. If there's 10+ people with salaries, sales better be good. I think a bootstrapping approach or an open source approach a la WordPress would be much more viable. Editorially seems to have only failed because of their specific criteria, not because there's isn't a need for a better tool.

[kskz]

No, I don't think there is much of a demand, at least not enough to sustain an entire business. You would need to be pulling in serious money from publishers, and on top of that, you're trying to change a system that largely already works. I've published myself, and e-mailing drafts was fine. The only times I've ever seen collaborative documents being used by average people were a) real-time coding interviews, and b) filling out forms. People would not be willing to pay money in either case, no matter how good it is.