But the ingenuity and specialisation of software applications now available is unceasingly amazing. There are few areas of business (or personal) life that cannot be assisted (or complicated!) by some clever application.

Some come from the major enterprise system vendors; some from high-growth all software corporations that are now such a mature part of the industry. Other comes from boutique ISVs who use expertise gained in a particular industry to create application to enhance efficiency and effectiveness in that industry. And when those boutique solutions reach a certain mainstream critical mass, they grow to behemoth status themselves (SAP) or become part of the big vendors' offerings, either through partnership (e.g. Digital Union and IBM) or acquisition (e.g. Navision and Microsoft).

So whether it's Business Intelligence, Geographic Information Systems, CAD-CAM, power system control, mobile gaming, garden planning or learning to type, there's a choice of applications for it.

The tricky part, from the vendors' standpoint, is that customers are putting less and less intrinsic value on all but the really innovative applications. They expect bundles. They expect free downloads and upgrades. They see competition driving the price down. And with new models of application availability (web services, ASP, utility computing etc.) it may be difficult for application vendors (particularly independent ones) to command the premiums and revenue streams they need to fund development.

Faster innovations and successful marketing will create awareness of the differentiators, but this is a segment where the go-to-market model and the skills that underpin it will have to change significantly over the rest of this decade.