I am too young to remember when Google broke onto the scene. Considering I only started using email with a university account in 1997, and tentatively exploring the web a little after that, it is fair to say that I arrived quite late to the technology party.

It would also be pretty fair to say that I was looking the other way, or more likely, trying to get older kids to buy Newcastle Brown at the corner shop for me, when most of the great technology events of the past decade or two occurred. But I might finally have cracked it this time, with Wolfram Alpha.

Created by British-born scientist and all-round brainbox Stephen Wolfram, it is what he calls a “computational knowledge engine”, and therefore differs from search in a few vital ways. Which is just as well, because despite new search engines launching every few weeks, Google still has the lion’s share of the market.

Some, such as Oparla, have tried to differentiate themselves from the competition by offering users the chance to win money by searching, while others, such as Yauba, say they can offer privacy protection. Another, MelZoo, previews search results on the right-hand side of the screen. All seek to do something that web behemoth Google cannot do, but so far none has met with much success. This is because most human beings are creatures of habit, and they have by now grown rather used to using Google to search the web.

Wolfram’s bid to be inducted into the digital hall of fame, however, does not rest on out-Googling Google, but providing a rather different kind of service.

Put simply, Google looks up web pages that may contain the answer to your query, whereas Wolfram Alpha reads and processes your query before computing the answer. Well, in theory anyway.

To explain fully how it does this is beyond my capabilities, for reasons I alluded to at the start of this column. However, in Wolfram’s own words, the technology aims to “explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so it is immediately computable”. Simple.

And Wolfram and his team have tried to do this with a combination of automated help from his Mathematica computational software program, and lots of human experts.

Now with all that complexity going on behind the scenes, Wolfram has been wise to keep the user interface pretty clean ­ there is only one input field, much like Google.

There have, however, already been some complaints, including accusations that the site is not web standards compliant, and that the engine cannot understand users’ queries. Early feedback on the Wolfram Alpha blog points to disgruntled users failing to have their “simple” questions, such as “What is the highest building in London?”, answered. And yet the same engine can hazard a guess at “How many fish in the sea?”. Total ocean fish biomass, in case you were wondering, is estimated at 2,000,000,000 metric tons.

This is a project that will never be finished, says Wolfram, so perhaps it is a little early to judge this effort, especially given the vast number of man hours and computing resources that it has taken to get it this far. Remember, Google wasn’t built in a day and Wolfram’s pet project is still an alpha.

It is probably best not to rely on Wolfram Alpha just now for any mission-critical tasks, but given the extraordinary potential, it is well worth keeping tabs on it. Just think ­ I might yet be able to claim one day that I was there at the birth of a technological phenomenon.

By Phil Muncaster

Isn’t it time IT leaders stopped asking where software-as-a-service (SaaS) might be deployed in their business, and started wondering instead where it shouldn’t?

Recently, SaaS pioneer Salesforce.com celebrated its 10th birthday. This year it also became the first enterprise cloud computing company to reach $1bn (£700m) in annual revenue, and has about 1.5 million subscribers.

If you want an alternative snapshot of how far on-demand/SaaS/cloud computing ­ – whatever you want to call it ­ – has come, look no further than Serena Software, an application development tools provider that migrated more than 700 worldwide staff to Gmail, in about the time it takes me to get to and from work.

Here is a sizable company dumping Microsoft Exchange because it can get a cheaper, more efficient and no less reliable service from the cloud. All done in the blink of an eye.

A recent Forrester Research report confirmed that the model has evolved beyond its early roots in customer relationship management and human capital management applications and is now gaining traction in areas such as web conferencing, collaboration and IT service management. These categories will experience significant SaaS success over the next decade, says Forrester, with only business intelligence and integration technology vendors unlikely to adopt the model.

But what of the caveats to this brave new world? Gmail itself was rocked by an outage in February, which had the Twitterati tweeting furiously. It was only out for about two and a half hours, but highlighted the problems, some said, of letting loose consumer technologies in the corporate sphere, and especially of using cloud-based technologies ­ – it’s out of your IT department’s control, you see?

Well, it hasn’t bothered Serena. René Bonvanie, senior vice president of IT, told me that Salesforce, Google et al do a better job of uptime and transparency than most IT departments can manage, it’s just that outages are so much more vis ible with these vendors.

And as for security concerns – ­ they are no greater with Salesforce than they would be with an on-premise Oracle solution, he says. Recent privacy concerns around Google’s cloud computing services may rock the boat for a little while, but too much momentum has already gathered for this to spoil the SaaS party.

By Phil Muncaster

Last October, the head of Sequoia Capital, the top dog in Silicon Valley venture capital, called a now infamous meeting. The heads of the companies in which Sequoia had invested were ushered into a boardroom where, standing before them, was a gravestone bearing the epitaph “RIP Good Times.”

British partner Mike Moritz then began a detailed explanation of how bad the next few years were likely to be. Staff would have to be cut, budgets trimmed to the bone and all industries would be hit ­ business and consumer. Given Sequoia Capital’s clout and track record, the whole tech industry took the message to heart.

However, nearly six months later, the situation may not be as gloomy as some first believed. Redundancies have been bad but businesses are still buying they are simply more selective about IT.

A case in point is the move to green computing, which is receiving a double stimulus from government spending and the knowledge that it makes sense, because efficient technology saves money.

Likewise, mobile data also seems to be surviving. Mobile internet is taking off in the US in a big way now that services are being standardised. The duality of mobile phone standards in the US has left the country two steps behind Europe, and to an extent one behind Asia. But 3G has won out and there is now strong growth in mobile applications, particularly in financial transactions and location-based services.

But the really safe bet seems to be services. Salesforce.com and other software-as-a-service firms have seen a big uptake in business. It is partly the result of reliable web connections but also the cost savings involved. Buying software on CDs is seen as wasteful and so old fashioned.

Companies such as IBM have been seeing growth in software services revenue while hardware sales head in the opposite direction. IBM’s sale of its PC division to Lenovo is now looking like a very smart move indeed.

The one bright spot in hardware is mobile sales. The iPhone is making a play for the business market, although it needs much more application support to really make an impression; RIM is continually hitting the market with better BlackBerry models, and the new Palm Pre looks to be a smash if the company can deliver on time.

By Iain Thomson, US editor

Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) has shown one thing at least, the company has given up on Vista and is now looking at Windows 7 as its saviour.

The extent to which Redmond is now trying to focus attention on its next operating system rather than the current one shows that Microsoft has now accepted what its customers have been so ably demonstrating; Vista is not wanted and is best left to the history books.

The whole focus of PDC seems to have been about Windows 7. Vista is being treated like the indolent teenager of its product line.

When Vista was announced it was supposed to be the software giant's golden child – a ground-up rewrite that would solve the security problems that had dogged Microsoft for so long and a new architecture that would marry closely with the profitable Office suites of the future.

Instead the system was a neutered version of what it was supposed to be, and resource-hungry to boot. It was always going to be a difficult sell to persuade customers that an operating system was good enough to justify upgrading enterprises, but to produce software that required a hardware upgrade as well would never fly.

For years Microsoft has been in a symbiotic relationship with hardware vendors; it would provide software that needed faster and faster systems to run in exchange for giving the users more functions that they wanted.

But we’ve reached the point now where all of the basic functions needed by businesses and consumers can be run with existing software and hardware. With the exception of server systems and high-end applications, plus a few gamers, there’s very little need to upgrade, since computers do pretty much what we want them to do.

Add in the latest trend towards netbooks, a market Vista cannot penetrate, and you have a perfect storm for the operating system.

So Microsoft’s focus on Windows 7 is understandable, but will it save the company. I have serious doubts.

Yes, in two years' time companies will have retooled their computers to handle the demands of the new operating system. But first looks indicate that Windows 7 will be a rebadged version of Vista and Microsoft will need to bring more to the table if it is going to win back customers.

To compound the issue, open-source software is going to look increasingly attractive to companies in the future. The new generation of IT staff has been raised on open source, they’ve used it as students and the old argument that support costs are higher with open source are no longer true.

Futurology is difficult at the best of times, but it looks as though Windows XP was the pinnacle of Microsoft’s success and it will all be downhill from here.

By Iain Thomson

Next month’s Gartner Symposium, to be held in the exclusive Mediterranean playground of Cannes, will explore corporate use of social networking. You could argue that is like meeting up to talk about the opportunity to eradicate the need to meet up in the future, but in a nicer place, with better weather and the chance to enjoy some decent food and wine on business expenses.

But Gartner is serious, and it is predicting that 60 per cent of Fortune 1000 companies will connect to or host a form of online community by 2010. Once you get beyond the headline-grabbing statistics, the key phrase here is “form of online community”, which may or may not resemble Facebook or MySpace, but which could well have something in common with LinkedIn.

Social networking is big business, or at least it is predicted to be in the future. Irrespective of whether Facebook, MySpace, Bebo et al can actually make the sort of money that eager financiers anticipate, the dizzying success of social networking sites to date has made a big impact on the business world.

Marketing executives now worry that their competition is getting better brand awareness by creating social networking profiles, for example. Sales staff are paranoid that deals are being made with rivals on social network sites behind their back. Even HR professionals agonise that potential candidates will go to other firms that make better use of Web 2.0 collaboration technology.

But what is the attraction? Photo and music sharing, contact lists, bulletin boards, classified adverts, email and instant messaging were all widely available from other web sites before.

The difference is that they are accessible at one site that works its socks off at fostering a sense of community among its visitors.

Certainly one of the best uses I have seen for a social networking site ­ which Gartner has also identified ­ is much like an extended customer support platform, basically just one more way for disgruntled users to sling mud at the manufacturer or supplier that sold the latest duff widget.

Another use would be to find more information about a product or service, although it is hard to explain why customers would want to visit a social networking site to find the same information that is on the company web site. The deciding factor could be that sense of user community, which means that other customer opinions can be sought and read at the same time, and people can swap notes about their own experiences.

Even so, the big draw of social networking from the corporate perspective remains the sheer number of people who use them. Web site monitoring resources such as Comscore now report that Facebook and MySpace regularly receive more than 120 million unique visitors per month.

Nevertheless, these numbers call for careful scrutiny. One recent estimate suggests that if these sites are being honest, there would be about 1.3 billion people worldwide using social networks ­ almost the entire internet population.

How many of these registered users are like me? I signed up to the site out of curiosity, discovered I had no friends (at least none that I wanted to contact) and never went back.

So when, if ever, will we know that the use of social networking has really taken off in the business world? Bearing in mind the questionable metrics of the digital world, maybe we should look for evidence of real-world signals, such as when the amount of business travel is vastly reduced. The point when airlines, taxi companies, hotels, restaurants and bars start going out of business in their droves might be as good a reference point as any.