"These traits were all present in our outlier group. They had an open and egalitarian office, with no individual offices. Every screen had an array of windows open — Skype, GChat, Campfire, Dropbox, Yammer, and Google Docs — the right technology for the right situation."

Surely none of these alternatives to email is "free" either. The cost of recovering your focus after being interrupted by any type of communication is high. At least emails, being asynchronous, can be easily ignored until later if you're concentrating on something important.

Also, if you use a half dozen different modes of communication, I imagine it would be hard to look for something that someone sent you last week.

this is pretty much an advertisement for google docs instead of email.

The article paints gdoc over email as the holy grail to fix communication. Gdoc barely fix document sharing!

There is no concept of groups. Well, there is, but it is broken beyond repair. Same for search (who would have thought). The default for a new doc is for it to be private. And people will often make a copy from group A, and share the copy with group B, so group A doesn't see that this person gave access to group B. Then this grow exponentially.

Another permission problem is that if you don't have access to edit, you also can't see history!

All this is made worse by the fact that the URLs are meaningless big hash strings.

Google docs are only good for a single use-case: if you are producing documents with several hands. And only while the document is live. After that, I hope you publish it some place more sane, even if it is copy-pasting into an email chain.