History of Collaborative Software
And the topic of collaboration has been around for some time. To underline this, I researched the roots of the concepts we are covering and combining in Mindquarry: file sharing with version control, Wiki, task management and group conversations: Some of the roots of the concepts and tools we are using are reaching back more than 35 years. For instance SCCS, the source code control system can be seen as a predecessor of RCS which was a predecessor of CVS which is a predecessor of Subversion which is used in Mindquarry's file sharing.
Taking the Usenet which is seen by many as the predeccessor of Web 2.0 and many styles of group conversations: It dates back to 1979, preceding even SMTP, the technology driving today's E-Mail system. Instant messaging applications, first found in form of UNIX talk program have been reinvented in the 90's as ICQ and with Jabber there is an open source IM protocol that was mainstreamed with Google Talk in 2005.
Even computer-managed todo lists probaly date back to one of the first uses of interactive text editors in the 70's, but it took years to come from an MS Project top-down approach of task management to the distributed approach of Bugzilla and other issue tracking software.
Another example: The idea of the WWW as an read-write medium date back to the initial development of HTTP and HTML in 1990, but it took five years to the first Wiki that practically implemented this vision and another ten years until Wikis became mainstream with Wikipedia breaking the 1 million articles barrier.
To answer the initial question: Collaboration is still a hot topic, because not only the people and the way they work changes, or the way they perceive technology changes, also technology itself takes it time to mature, to become adopted by a mass audience. The collaboration tools of tomorrow will have their roots in todays software.
I am Product Manager for Collaboration and Digital Asset Management at 