"It's likely that the Internet will soon experience a catastrophic failure, a multi­day outage that will cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars ... ." Yikes. Computerworld US is quoting informed sources who think the web's heading for an imminent meltdown.

Not everyone agrees, but of those who do:

The threat is "urgent and real" says The Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of large U.S. companies. The Washington-based public policy advocacy group says there is a 10% to 20% chance of a "breakdown of the critical information infrastructure" in the next 10 years, brought on by "malicious code, coding error, natural disasters, [or] attacks by terrorists and other adversaries."

My immediate reaction was that productivity would skyrocket, what with cubicle drones not longer able to find succor in Facebook or Trade Me. But apparently with email, ecommerce and software-as-a-service it wouldn't be such a good thing (read about the full horror here).

Speaking of software-as-a-service - and horror - here at PC World Towers we've been experimenting with Google Spreadsheets to share a planning document. The team complained - correctly - that I hogged it and never closed it. Plus, we're often far-flung. Spreadsheets held the promise of all of us editing simultaneously, from anywhere.

Alas it didn't work. It's quite a large spreadsheet, so we didn't want to start it again from scratch, but importing any of the Excel version's formulas into Google Spreadsheets proved a no-goer and drove me crazy. Google admits there are a number of "known issues" with Spreadsheets. And of course we have to wait for Google Gears before we can do anything off-line. Read more about software-as-a-service in NZ PC World February, on newsstands January 29.