Beyond the essential upgrades to the editors for documents, spreadsheets and a basic flowchart/image editing tool, Google has made major improvement on collaboration. Up to 50 people can now edit documents simultaneously – as in, real time. You can actually see what each user is typing as they type it!

Watch the video for more details on the upgrades. This particular round of changes to the Google Docs system is significant, I think, because now there are no real drawbacks to working “in the cloud” with Google Docs compared to working on a stand-alone app like Microsoft Word. Sluggish response time and unfriendly UI made both Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets unpleasant to use, but they seem to have licked that.

Furthermore, these changes are in line with some of what we’ve seen in the preview of Google Wave, which takes real-time collaboration/communication to the nth degree.