>Don't know much about Gears - but one thing jumped out: System requirements state that XP or Vista are the only supported Windows platforms. That seems to leave your later argument against .NET 3.5 out on a limb :-}

Gears is just one such system and Windows isn't the only show in town :)

>OK. I confess to knowing nothing of these technologies. Accessing the Cappuccino web-site didn't provide much enlightenment - either broad generalities or nitty-gritty documentation. The only concrete fact I gathered (but I may be wrong) if that the whole thing is held up by large wodges of Javascript - a language I abhor.

All Ajax platforms are centred around Javascript. You recall that Fox/VFP/xBase got a real bad rap as being a toy language. That was mostly because it allowed amateurs to knock something out quickly that worked but was bad. Javascript is like that. Javascript is a brilliant language when used in an object oriented way. In recent years, a whole new development approach around JS has emerged. There are fantastic new compilers available that JIT JS to machine code (see Google Chrome's V8 JS engine - Mozilla's Trace Monkey). JS is really going places and is IMHO, the thing that will compete with Silverlight moreso than anything else, Flash included.

>And (no disrepect intended) they have no concerns as to whether your infrastructure in reliable? And surely SaaS, by definition, requires an Internet connection?

Infrastructure is provided by massive providers. It is not our or my infrastructure. SaaS apps obviously require an internet connection. Can you get through your working day without an internet connection? When there isn't one, then you can go into off-line mode. If the service goes down, it goes down. But then servers in-house fail and networks/lans/wans go down to. That's life.

>Can we save the discussion of UI for another time?

Sure :)