We are working on making a downloadable "server component" available. Until we do, you'll indeed have to trust us to keep our servers online.

All the technicalities are ofcourse hidden for the normal user. You just click "open" on the webpage, edit the document, and press save.

Haha, blame the design people. Apparently they really care about how a tittle piece of text looks :) I'll kill the flash off as soon as possible, but we were on a deadline.

Creating a new document creates... well.. an empty blank document! You can edit it with abiword, and then after a save it is non-blank :)

No, MS Word does now allow collaborative editing of Word documents (they do for spreadsheets and presentations).

Yes. for sure in a commercial form. If I were the only one to decide, I'd open source all of it right now, but we'll see how that turns out.

What would be even better, is that we offer a self-hosted version. In an ideal world, I'd open source all of abicollab.net right now, but we need to have an business plan discussion first before we decide to do that :)

Actually, you can create permalinks to a document in any format you like, such as PDF, .docx, .odf, rtf, html, or other formats. As soon as you make an edit, all permalinks will be automatically be updated with the latest document contents, thus removing the need to "export" in a particular format yourself.

RTLinuxFree does this. The default scheduler is kinda lame (at least last time I hacked on it), but you can for example replace them with my DMI and EDFI schedulers to get all the fancy features you describe, and more.