I'm writing this column in Notepad. Why? Have you tried writing an outline, end notes or an indented bulleted list using the latest word-processing software? Wizards and autoformatting tools try to anticipate what you're typing and in the process irreversibly scramble your work.

Our modern operating systems contain vast numbers of CPU-consuming add-ons: a wagging dog that searches for your files, invisible background processes that constantly download patches and user-interface tchotchkes such as thumbnail previews of your multimedia. With all this increased complexity comes a lack of reliability, perpetual security holes and poor performance. Boot times are long, lockups are frequent, and viruses are epidemic.

Although my computer today is 100 times more powerful than what I had in the late '90s, my current environment has less speed, lower productivity and higher cost of ownership than my Pentium running Windows 98 Second Edition and Microsoft Office 97.

In my view, it's time to rethink what the industry is producing with thick-client software, bloated with a spiraling number of esoteric features. What we need is " Google Office With Ajax for Linux" or "Microsoft Office Lite" -- a Web-based, server-centric, thin-client application suite that isn't perfect but is good enough.

This is not about Microsoft vs. open-source. It's about creating highly reliable, usable tools that run anywhere, anytime. It's about reining in the sales and marketing departments of software vendors whose revenue-growth targets propel them to offer feature-filled upgrades more often than the customer base desires.