Marco Ieni was tired of working with Microsoft Word so he he built a workflow that uses Org mode for document preparation. Irreal readers know he won’t be getting any arguments here. Even putting aside the brain-dead Word UI there are compelling reasons to prefer plain text: you can use effective version control; write with any editor; make use of grep, diff, and similar utilities; and even generate some text programmatically. And, of course, your data is not held captive in some proprietary format.
There’s nothing new about any of that, of course, but Ieni took it a step further and considered the problem of collaborators. He accepts that convincing colleagues to adopt Emacs is basically impossible so he came up with a command line utility, doc-org, to enable non-Emacsers to have a sensible writing environment. Of course, they still have use some sort text editor, which many academics would no doubt consider an intolerable burden but Ieni says that the system is mainly aimed at people who are already using LaTeX and would like to move to the easier Org markup. It’s a good fit for people like that. As Ieni puts it, “The main goal of doc-org is to bring the conciseness of org mode to latex users.”
Ieni concludes his post by saying that he hopes that people will come to realize that “the best way to write documents together is the same of writing code together: plain text + version control systems like git.” Realistically that’s probably not going to happen but the most efficient and successful will probably adopt some sort of notion similar to this.