Compare Yahoo groups to for-fee commercial collaboration applications on a per-feature basis and it comes out surprisingly well. It may not be as secure or feature-rich as commercial products, but it's free and it provides the basics of a team workspace including: shared file storage, database, polls, member management, shared calendar, messaging, and chat.

There are thousands (if not tens of thousands) of shared spaces indexed in Yahoo groups, yet most business users probably exclude their workspace from the searchable index. When their IT department can't provide a workspace, many business teams turn to Yahoo.

The question is if Yahoo might capitalize on their position. Many small businesses would gladly pay a modest monthly fee for Yahoo's service sans advertising. If Yahoo chooses to do this, they would disrupt the collaborative tool market.