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There was probably not much unusual about the computer issues in our four hotels last week in Europe. One had no computer; two had only one computer, the third, which was very much a destination for business travelers, had three. All had slow Internet connections. One had Word, Excel and a handful of other applications. Another had Word and Excel Viewer, but not those applications themselves and could not read the docx file format. I passed on the fourth which cost 5 euros for 30 minutes.

Maybe the hotels are counting on the fact that Europeans have turned more heavily to mobile devices than Americans have. But while most hotels in this country have better systems, there is always that question about how do you get to your data and how quickly and easily can you do it. Sometimes with hotel Wi-Fi systems, you can't get to your data.

That is the ultimate question in our computing system. We should not have to worry about what devices we carry or which applicatons we use. We want to know that we can do work.

During airplane flights, I would far prefer to have a seat-back system that would let me communicate with my hard drive than having to think about synchronizing data between home and remote hardware. Most people will probably do this eventually via handheld devices.

But those such as writers who do longer sessions in certain applications, such a word processing need more than a tiny screen. PC-based programs and handhelds have their limitations. I still remember fondly the relative ease with which I could store and retrieve story files remotely from the minicomputer system my employer was using in the late 1980s. And I didn't need a special application on my home computer.

This one of the appeals of SaaS applications in that the database is always available as long as the Internet work and the application provider's system works. (As we learned this month from Sage an Intuit, that's not always the case.)

However, few of us use a single application so an online accounting program doesn't come close to solving all the problems of working remotely. Right now, Internet-based applications are still largely best-of-breed.

No one application or device solves this ultimate question of access to data. We need that more sophisticated communication of the minis, combined with the desktop intelligence and control of a PC.

It's going to take time.

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