The waste is enormous. I confess that once I put a certain regular mailing in my e-mail kill file, because I didn't have the heart to tell a coworker that I had no use for the documents he spent his life on. Microsoft will go on adding features to its bloated office products forever, but never will it support the type of collaborative work that fosters sudden inspiration, in my opinion. This is because such support would require putting more power in the users' hands, leaving it up to the users to define their forums and their ground rules. The model is not top-down.
Collaborative software is hard to develop in any case.
Just checking multiple clients for updates to a common document, managing locks on resources, and monitoring the coming and going of clients requires a surprising amount of overhead. Authentication is also a big job. Especially for Microsoft, whose clumsy handling of Kerberos shows that it's a newcomer to the authentication game. But the dominance of Microsoft products will hold it back for an indefinite amount of time. Immersion People who collaborate do so with all their senses and faculties.