How does Word work out when multiple collaborators are writing at once? One of the cool things about version controlling LaTeX is that conflicts, merges, etc are dealt with using standard tools, which is super helpful when you have collaborators across the globe furiously writing and redoing figures a few days before a deadline.
Word is awkward for this. (At least the offline versions of Word are---I've never tried the online ones.) Word does have a "track changes" feature, which is invaluable when you have multiple authors, at least in the absence of 'traditional' source control tools. I don't think many neuroscientists have tried a LaTeX-git workflow and rejected it---I think the learning curve of LaTeX and git are steep enough that few have tried it. I myself prefer LaTeX, but I think you'll admit it also has its frustrations. And any time I suggesting using it to my neuroscience coworkers, they looked at me like I had lobsters coming out of my ears.
Well when you deal with merge conflicts in Word, your standard tool is Word. I don't think you can get much more standard than Office when you consider collaborators outside academia. It's not great for simultaneous editing (although I think this is now possible in 365).
It is, however, very good for tracking changes over versions. Many academics are not familiar with git, diff and so on and it's nice to easily see historical edits in the document. For simple documents like abstracts, it's much easier to send a Word document than it is to send a tex file and assume that everyone on consortium is going to be able to compile it (especially if you work with industry).
It would want to have improved since I used it a couple years ago in Word 2013. The main problem was with citation managers - Word would give a paragraph lock to you whenever you edited a paragraph, and it would only unlock that paragraph after a save (either auto or manual). Of course, when you have a citation manager, they have the habit of changing all the paragraphs when you insert a new citation that changes the numbering (ie. [1] becomes [2], etc.).
with office365 it's not terrible, but it's worse than google docs or quip imo. i've run into trouble esp when some people edit from web and some edit from desktop.
