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> Is realtime collaboration offered in any competing desktop apps?

Office 2016 does have realtime collaboration in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, in both the desktop and online apps.

Desktop office is not real time - it's synced and since office web sucks compared to gDocs - gDocs win new markets.

MS's OneNote has real-time collab capability.

Office 2016 has real-time collaboration on the Mac, and has for quite some time.

Source: I work on Office for Mac at Microsoft.