I wrote a published paper in Word. That review/annotation feature is pretty handy. Not as good as collaborating on Google Docs but it got the job done. I guess I'm not as 1337 as everyone else here 
.
I mean, hey, use whatever works for you.
Personally, I find Google Docs even worse than word, both for composing and typesetting documents, and for collaboration. The only real advantage it has is being online and not requiring any extra software installation. (Don’t get me wrong, that’s a big advantage, and nothing to sneeze at.)
In both Word and Google Docs, I find it extremely hard to keep track of complicated changes coming in from several people, and hard to have structured discussions about particular changes. If all your proofreader/editor needs to do is fix a couple typos and make a small handful of suggestions, they work okay, but as soon as you try to do big reorganizations of text, rewrite a substantial proportion of the sentences, or suggest complicated document-wide changes, especially if there are more than 2–3 people involved in the process, Word and similar tools fall over hard in my experience. Even when individual comments and changes are simple and small, once you get to more than about 20 per page, figuring out which one points where and not missing anything becomes a real pain in the ass.
The times I’ve tried using Word to collaborate with a sizable number of people, because that was the workflow they were used to, I found myself really frustrated. Because different people got different versions of the file, there were many incompatible changes and conflicting comments. Trying to compare them all to each other or figure out how they related was not easy. As far as I can tell there’s no easy way to merge selected changes from multiple people and then “rebase” (to use the git term) new people’s comments onto the new merged document. As a result, much of the discussion actually ended up migrating to chains of emails. So as a result there were ultimately maybe 10–20 different copies of the Word file with different incompatible changes, and a few hundred emails, also with discussion of the same document. Some of the comments from the word sticky note feature ended up duplicated in emails, but other discussions were unique to the sticky notes, or unique to the emails. Sorting it all out was an enormous pain.
Personally, I would find it easier to compare comments written in red pen on a printout and integrate them all manually myself, rather than using Word’s collaboration features.
When I compare with the tools build for collaboration among programmers (version control tools, diff tools, code review tools, etc.) using Word like being stuck in the dark ages. Using programmer-oriented tools involves a steeper learning curve, but ultimately they are an order of magnitude more powerful and efficient, and everything stays much better organized.
I think the biggest advantage/difference between WYSIWYG and plain-text-based formats is that people building tools have a radically easier time interacting with plain text than with proprietary binary blobs. As a result, there is a much wider variety of tools available, supporting a much wider variety of workflows and working styles.
