Yeah, it surprises me, whenever I stop to think about it, that this isn't more common by now.
In the group I work in we make heavy use of email, of course, and we do have a few remote people who call in via VOIP to meetings, and sometimes we do screen sharing with them, but that's about as far as it goes. We rarely do video, though all our laptops have webcams. We do have a room with a fancy videoconferencing setup with cameras that focus on the person currently speaking -- it's very nice, but it can only connect to another setup of its kind, and the remote people on my team aren't in the one other location I know of that has such a setup; so it's not nearly as valuable as one would like.
The upshot is, I'm left agreeing with those who say that the most effective collaboration still requires being in the same place. Our remote people are certainly productive and part of the team, but we just don't have the same kind of impromptu conversations that I have with my podmates.
And I wonder what the solution might be. Double Robotics [0] certainly has an interesting take on that question; I don't know anyone who has tried it, though.
I actually work in a completely remote team, in the sense that everyone works remotely (about 50 people). So there is no hierarchy of remote people being second-class team members, as you seem to be describing.
For minute-by-minute chats we use IRC, and that works well. For longer conversations, mailing lists. And we have twice weekly video conferences, and twice yearly physical meet ups.
This works well. I suspect it wouldn't work well if half the people were sitting in a room together and had conversations that were not accessible to the remote workers.
Do you think/feel this affects how close-knit a team can be in your company?
From what you say you don't seem to use video much (for one-on-one), so a lot of visual/non-verbal is lost (also there are no non-work regular meetups, e.g. lunches, which I think helps with nurturing a bit of informality).
Also when someone is sitting next to me the threshold for asking a question is rather low, and when working remote I tend to waste more time looking for answers on my own. So my guess is that would affect productivity also.
But still I wonder if there are many of these completely remote largish (> 15, say) companies. It's a very interesting model.
there are no high-quality virtual environments (except for killing each other)?
you literally cannot even throw an idea up on a whiteboard and have it be there two weeks later: there is no such thing online. (virtual second-life collaborative spaces.)
online collaborative meetings are a joke compared to real life - as a piece of evidence, if they weren't you wouldn't have teams having to scramble to move to silicon valley, you would just have virtual incubators: in terms of its "manufacturing" output anything an online startup needs can be done over the wire. (phone and server costs are basically it.)
I use consumer video conferencing* a lot, but there are clearly huge leaps waiting to be made. It could be easier, larger, higher quality and fit more seamlessly into the environment.
My point is that fixing video conferencing is a lot cheaper than building skyscrapers in the centre of San Francisco, and certainly more politically acceptable.
If you mean, what stops me from fixing video conf, then largely it's because I have a much more interesting job already.
So allow people to cluster in high quality virtual environments.