The opposite of what you are asking: As someone who has worked remotely for 5 years, I can say that a big reason that it works for us is the willingness of ever

The opposite of what you are asking: As someone who has worked remotely for 5 years, I can say that a big reason that it works for us is the willingness of everyone to make time for collaboration. For our team (mostly writers, consultants, analysts), this means picking up the phone and having conversations with each other constantly. For perspective, I use ~3000 minutes/month on the phone. This is largely made up of 15-30 minute calls. If your work product doesn't lend itself to spoken discussion too well, or if that kind of collaboration doesn't suit the team, I can easily see why it would be very difficult to make it work. It is easy to collaborate remotely on ideas, but pretty difficult to collaborate on the final product. If I worked in an field that required a lot of visual collaboration, like design, I don't think it would work nearly as well. The online, webex style tools are still too poor to support good collaboration on those kinds of tasks IMO.