[Fomite]

This is something of a double-edged sword. Writing in LaTeX requires all the collaborators to be familiar with it - nearly everyone is familiar enough with Word to make that work, but as multidisciplinary papers become more common, the same is not necessarily true for LaTeX.

I encountered this when working with a group of both applied math people and clinicians - the applied math people all wanted to use LaTeX, but the gains just weren't worth the learning curve for the clinical co-authors.

[duaneb]

Surely google docs is better for collaboration than word is, though, unless you're doing serious math typesetting.

[Fomite]

Google Docs is decent, though I do usually have a fair amount of math typesetting, but one of the key issues with Google Docs is you have to trust everyone doing the writing to not change the tone of the piece, etc. It's less conducive to the "Single Approving Authority" model that I've found useful in some recent papers I've written.