Browsers: The OS for SAAS

Yours is a typical modern company. You have sales and customer management systems, advanced project management tools, extensive network and system security infrastructures, collaboration tools, and a heavily customized enterprise content management system. What's not so typical now--but will be in the near future--is that none of these applications is run in-house. All of these core applications are delivered over the Web in a SAAS (software-as-a-service) model. As such, the applications are accessed via a Web browser that is basically acting as the operating system. There's nothing wrong with that. Right? Right?The idea of the browser as the operating system has been around since the early days of the Web. In fact, it is generally accepted that Microsoft went after Netscape so hard because it feared that the Netscape browser would become more important than the operating system it ran on. That fear may have been unfounded at the time, but we are much closer now to being able to access everything--from e-mail to office applications to image editing to essential enterprise business applications--from the confines of the humble Web browser...eWeek