Tired of buying high-priced bloatware office apps like Office XP? Maybe you're sick of having to update your spiffy new virus scanner every half hour? Well, get ready for the next step forward...or the next step back. Web-based applications are all the rage among the computerati these days, with people predicting that in the next few years, sales of office suites, daily schedulers, virus scanners, you name it, sinking to zero as everyone starts to use Web-based word processors and graphics editors. Okay, but this reminds one writer about the bad old days of everyone being tied to the mainframe, with the mainframe being the only source of the word processor, database, or whatever. In those days, if the mainframe went down, everyone was stuck until the computers were brought back up. ("Whaddya mean, those days?" I know, I know.) The drawback here is that if your Internet connection gets uppity and refuses to let you connect, you can't connect to your word processor or whatever program you need to use. At least with your own copy of Office 2000, you aren't dependent on the vagaries of the Net, the phone system, your ISP, or whatever, to get your work done. Web apps are here to stay for sure, but I can't see everyone deleting their own copies of their software just yet.

Some of the leading virtual office providers include eRoom.net, Huddle247, LiveOffice, onProject, PlanetIntra, Punch WebGroups, and QuickTeam. All of these are much more business-oriented than consumer (i.e. slobs like me and you won't get much use out of them for our home computing), but you might take a look at a couple to see where the trend is taking us. Maybe "packaged applications" providers such as Aspire, FutureLink, and Wizmo, which either host software packages such as office suites or remotely manage and administer them, are a little more useful for the casual ruck, but they're still tailoring themselves, and marketing themselves, much more for business usage.