I know people who have switched to Gmail, Bloglines, and Del.icio.us for mail, feedreading, and bookmarks in a calculated attempt to free themselves as much as possible from the desktop and any specific OS. There's some appeal in that idea to me. One fly in the ointment, however, are office applications like Word and Excel. Today Richard MacManus profiles a host of Web-based applications aimed at changing that. These Web-based replacements for Word and Excel aren't ready for prime-time yet, but they are a taste of things to come, in my opinion.