The intranet does not bode well for many of the software technology vendors who are so clearly behind it. But Smart Companies, on the other hand, see this as the key to creating an enterprise without boundaries. Nor could most people have foreseen just a few short years ago what would happen to the cost of cellular phones. The ability of the Web to act as an instantaneous delivery vehicle for dissemination of applications is far too tempting for most software providers. By infiltrating business enterprises with their particular products, these vendors hope to be able to go back and provide the back-end services that enable their client's applications.
Applications create islands of automation.
They separate and segregate functions that are intuitively part of the same process. This is tantamount to using a different type of phone for every state you want to call. Today, it is not outrageous to predict that within a decade, at most, all talk of applications will fade away. Word processing, spreadsheets and databases will all become part of a single integrated business environment, known as the business operating system . Users will no longer launch or care about applications , per se.