In the technology arena, the buzzwords and catchphrases come almost as fast as the technical advancements, and one of the latest phrases to join the club is PaaS, or Platform as a Service. Service oriented approaches are becoming more and more popular, and largely for good reason. In general this is positive. People don’t care about the specific things it takes to deliver a particular service or set of services- the care about the outcomes. The problem for many PaaS offerings is they fail to fully deliver on some of the most critical requirements.
In many ways, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Hardware as a Service (HaaS) products are easier to define and fulfill. SaaS, effectively application hosting, is common enough for things like e-mail and web site hosting, and the advent of cloud computing and a hyper-connected user base has made distributed applications more and more feasible and efficient. Google’s document editing and sharing applications are one good example of this.
HaaS takes that same ‘black box’ approach to the role of hardware in an IT deployment, commoditizing computer components and defining them as their deliverables. Hard drives become disk space, memory and processor chips become resource percentages. When you make photocopies at your local office supply store, that’s HaaS in action. The customer pays a small cost for the use of an expensive machine, in this case a photocopier.
Platform as a Service merges SaaS and HaaS approaches, and is intended to function in similar capacities to managed dedicated servers. In theory this is an attractive idea, giving developers low cost, flexible platforms for application development, testing, and deployments. In practice, PaaS offerings often fall short in the most important requirements.
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The iPhone may be the center of attention at the smart phone party right now, but when it’s time to get down to business, the leader remains the BlackBerry. Even the top executive in the country famously has his own souped up model. The BlackBerry has become ubiquitous in companies all over America, and it’s not an exaggeration to suggest that business would halt if people’s Blackberries stopped working (the proof being a notorious outage of a couple years ago). 
The much ballyhooed iPhone 3.0 update is here, and with it come a number of significant improvements in the way the iPhone integrates with Microsoft Exchange server. As a counter to the button down business oriented Blackberry, the iPhone has been seen as the ‘fun’ device, but when combined with Exchange server, the iPhone is a powerful business smart phone in its own right.
When the history of early 21st century business is written, Google will certainly be counted among the success stories, and big component of their success has been the wide adoption of Gmail. Although not the first to offer a free e-mail service, Google’s mail service has been very popular thanks to a minimalist approach- slim on features, but easily accessed on a variety of web enabled devices. As a recent letter sent to Google CEO Eric Schmidt points out, one of the features they’ve scrimped on is security.
