In 1999 when senior vice president Marc Benioff left Oracle to create Salesforce.com, many thought he was headed for a cliff at full steam but 10 years down the line, software as a service (SaaS) is a matured business model. Online productivity applications have joined the fray and are maturing at a brisk pace (Say Google Docs, Zoho).

In our modern enterprise, the database is a corner of most of the software architecture and I ask myself, will the database move into the cloud too? Will I be able to implement applications and point it to a database somewhere unknown?

The benefits are obvious – zero hardware configurations, zero backups (hey, I could spend a million dollars for that!), titanium grade security protection, etc. But should things fail, I have loss of data staring me in the face. With that I could get a jail time or be bankrupt depending on what data is missing.

These are interesting times.

Firefox 2 is hardly sitting tight before the pretty boys at Mozilla started building the third iteration of the best browser in the world (sulk if you like!). You can read about some of the interesting features here.

Over the last one year since Jesse James Garette unleashed the Ajax dragon (he didn't create it, he only gave it a fancy name) everyone has jumped on the bandwagon of how Web 2.0 (whatever that means) and Ajax will save the world. How they will chase the traditional desktop app out of the market. Well, I don't believe it. It is too much hype.

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