Every couple of weeks while I'm at Microsoft I hear co-workers or executives say stuff that makes me wonder whether we are stuck in a time warp. My current pet peeve  is when I hear someone use the term Software as a Service or even worse the abbreviation "SaaS" to describe Web-based. There are people here who are so disconnected from the real world that to them Web-based software is some hot, new thing that deserves it's own magical new buzzword. Seriously, if you go around saying stuff like "Software as a Service" in 2006 then you are fricking dinosaur.

Another example of the kind of dinosaur mentality I'm ranting against is linked from a post on Robert Scoble's blog entitled Flickr’ing an unusual Mix06 meeting. In that post he links to the following image

At some meeting about a new Web conference coming out of Microsoft, one of the insightful ideas on the white board is "The Web is inevitable and her to stay". Is this 1996? That would have been insightful a decade ago, now it just makes us seem over the hill. Competitors like Google and Yahoo! are already thinking about the next level (e.g. making deals with network service providers to increase the quality of the user experience when visiting their sites, making heavy bets on the mobile Web, and bridging the gap between the Web and television in concrete ways) yet here we are finally admitting that maybe wishing that the Web will go away isn't a winning strategy.

Sometimes it feels like I work in dinosaur country.