I am working with my students on a research proposal to the National Science Foundation. The general idea of what we are up to is a sort of mixed-reality equivalent of Google Docs. Except instead of the shared “document” being just on everyone’s screen, it can also be in your physical space.
All of this would be using technology that doesn’t quite exist yet in the form that we’d like. But that’s why it’s research. 🙂
Google Docs is indeed a powerful tool for collaboration, and I don’t think we could be collaborating as well if we didn’t have it. And yet here we are, proposing to create something which may end up supplanting it in some ways.
I think that’s the way it is with tools. You use the best tools you can get your hands on, and sometimes you use them to make even better tools.
In a way you are building a kind of ladder of tools. You may eventually jump to those new tools, and abandon the old ones. But that is not a sign that those older tools have failed. It’s a sign that they have succeeded.