Bill Gates' announcement that Microsoft is charging into software-as-a-service shouldn't come as any surprise. It's late to the game, as usual, and Google is already way ahead. It's a really big deal for Microsoft, but is it a really big deal for the rest of us? Yes it is, and I'll tell you why: Microsoft can make it work.

We're already using a ton of Web-delivered software every day -- if you use IM, write a blog, pay bills online, use Web-based conferencing services, have a photo site you share with your family, or even check your e-mail in a browser you're doing it.

(I know some of these apps install software on your PC, but they wouldn't work without the Web. Stop being so small-minded.)But we haven't even scratched the surface of what we could do -- and already it's scratching back.

Microsoft's opportunity in Web-based softare is to do exactly what it did on the PC -- to provide a standard operating environment that software can run in dependably.

Remember when every app you used had to be patched every time there was a new version of DOS? I do. Whatever you think of Windows, that's one problem it pretty much fixed. I'm still running software that was published when Windows 95 was a pup.

As Web-delivered software gets more ambitious it will hit the same wall PC apps did. Probably by no coincidence at all, I had this very problem yesterday. I was looking at a new Web-based office suite called Thinkfree Office Online. You should check it out. It promises to let you create Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents in a Web browser.

I installed it. Wait, wait, I can hear you saying, if this is all Java that runs in a browser, what's to install? The answer, of course, is the Sun Java2 Platform Standard Edition and a new version of the JVM (or the JSRE -- some Java geek help me out here).

I liked ThinkFree Office Online. Good interface, compatible files, 30MB of free storage. Cool. Then I went back to work. I do all the work of editing the Desktop Pipeline in a browser, too. But all of a sudden I couldn't do some of it.

Turns out the new Java code had broken the old editing software. I had to track down and reinstall the Java 1.4.2 JRE, which I did. Now I can edit the Desktop Pipeline, but, of course, ThinkFree Office Online crashes my browser.

Sigh. I feel like I'm back in DOS 3.0. Fortunately it's a problem Microsoft has already solved once, and can probably solve again. Google and Sun have made an alliance -- maybe they could solve it, too. Who's your money on?