Ever since I was introduced to computers and computing in nineteen-something, it seemed that the natural scheme of things was to do things in a proprietary way and to pitch your products against a competitor’s.  DEC and IBM, Unix and DOS, Atari and Amiga….the list goes on – I’m sure you can add Wordperfect and Displaywrite 4 to the list if you were a pedant. (And yes, I know that is an IBM System/36 above, before you start. I wonder if the plant had an RPG II device name?).
Today though, there doesn’t seem to be the polarisation that I have always come to expect from the market. OK, I use OS X (why do Mac users always feel the need to tell everyone in their posts?), but that doesn’t mean I use one for any other reason than I want to. I’ve found that there is very little I need Windows for (domino designer springs to mind, but that is a dying art) – rather, I can achieve the same levels of productivity on anything nowadays as long as it has a standards compliant browser.  And so where is that fight nowadays? It isn’t hardware – that has been commoditised to the point where you can pick up a laptop with your shopping at Tesco – it isn’t OS based, or even software based – no one cares if you use office 2007 or openoffice any more.  No, I think it is in the SaaS (Software as a Service) arena – a phenomenal growth area.  But there are two very obvious omissions – no Apple or Microsoft offerings appear in this marketplace….the behemoths appear to have been wrong-footed again. 
 
In my current role at #insert_current_employer I was looking for a decent document repository that wasn’t box.net based. I needed something similar to the old domino teamroom style of ‘project spaces’.  I happened across www.glasscubes.com and i was quite blown away with the elegant simplicity of it.  It has a three user free trial, and it does seem to be robust and elegant and I like that. And it is SaaS based and you pay per bum-on-seat and, and, and,well – I am quite excited by it. Give it a go, and then tell the owner what you like and don’t like about it. SaaS is quite the place to be at the moment, and I can hear another 1999/2000 dotcom bubble being inflated as armies of VCs eye up the revenue streams geneated by these startups.  Lest you think it is an advert for glasscubes, I am also taken with liquidplanner.com/ – this is another corker. Well worth a look and has an interesting pedigree. 
 
Er, I thought I was supposed to be a tired cynical old IT hack? I almost sounded enthusiastic about something for a minute there….