I’m old enough to remember when Microsoft was not the only player in the word-processing / spreadsheet / presentation market. I’ll admit that there are alternatives out there like OpenOffice.org but when you look at shear numbers, it’s Microsoft. The old time competition from Lotus and Borland and Harvard, is just a footnote in techno-based history books.

However, with the advent of Software-as-a-Service (SaS or SaaS) new players have made real progress.

In yet another attempt to compete with Google Docs, Adobe has acquired online word processor Buzzword, after today’s Microsoft Office Live Workplace announcement. Now who’s going to snap up Zoho?
Source: Lifehacker

I don’t know if Adobe can make a go of it or if’s just an attempt to cover all their basis. Personally, If I were starting a business, I would be seriously looking at what Google Apps has to offer. They have “good enough” offerings in nearly all categories to be a one-stop-shopping solution. What I don’t know is how I would leverage Google’s offerings if I am an existing business – SMB, mid-size, or full on corporation.

The one drawback with a SaS solution remains “connectivity”. I feel cut-off when I don’t have Internet connectivity but there are enough cases where that is my operational mode. Further, there are lots of people who are not “always connected”. dial-up is still prevalent even in the USA.

I’ve been pondering the idea of desktop applications authored as mashups. the question becomes – what is the development environment ? You can run PHP, Perl, and other languages on a local machine but they really were not meant for that.  You could install Apache and Tomcat and have an HTML and applet environment but that seems more like making your personal computer an Internet server. While either of these may become the norm, I think it might be something else. In reality, it will likely be something like widgets and gadgets running in a browser.

Adobe has another idea, the Adobe Integrated Runtime or AIR. Adobe says,

Adobe? AIR?, formerly code-named Apollo, is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to use their existing web development skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.

There are, of course, a number of other cross-platform runtimes including Java and Microsoft has announced it’s cross language runtime will become cross platform as well.

What is interesting about AIR is that it is attempting to use the web developer skills rather than those of the typical programmer. It might work, then again, it might not.

The more I think about it, the more I’d like to see a packaged install of Apache + Tomcat + MySQL + PHP + some helpful libraries. Oh, Wait …. that would be XAMPP !