Sure, I was speaking directly to what I know...but, are distributed docs in Google Docs not more productive than passing around a Word doc with annotations? Is banking, accounting, trading stocks, bill payments, buying and selling nearly any product, not more productive today due to the same forces? We (people in tech) are just at the leading edge of it...but, it impacts everyone.
But, I would argue that the web platform has produced a bigger productivity boost (in terms of output per unit of time) than any other single paradigm shift in computing history. Who cares if typing is a little more sluggish than the native app if you don't have to email the resulting document to everyone on the team and then converge edits at the end of the editing process?
