ah, OneNote... so much potential, yet such an appalling lack of vision. The online version of onenote you mention is one of the best experiences I've seen in a javascript-based editor - blows google docs out of the water in terms of responsiveness and simplicity. And where does Microsoft put it? Some dark corner of that Windows Live documents/skydrive mess no one ever uses.

I feel OneNote would be better if it acquired that awesome Operational Transformation features that Etherpad demonstrated so well, and shed all that fancy formatting features that requires so much complexity.

Normal people don't require yet another Word clone - a simple editor that supports basic Markdown-like features (bullet points, numbering, headlines) is perfectly sufficient to get the contents of a document rolling (and if needed, Word can be used for adding formatting later), but what _is_ essential is a dead simple way to collaborate.

I've been following the OneNote team blog for quite a while now, and it seems like they're adding more collaboration features in the next version of Office, but don't hold your breath - it looks like yet another incredibly complicated mechanism that requires more trouble than it is worth.

_Sigh_