Web wars for the desktop - book travel from your email

A semi-revolution is underway. Travel agents now have a software product they can give you that integrates all the information from their Sabre reservations system into your Outlook email program. So, without a web browser, you can click and reserve and have your travel dates automatically entered into your Outlook calendar.

And this is just the beginning, according to this InformationWeek item. Direct connections to reservation systems will speed up--rental cars, hotels, etc. And distributors of many services will soon have to start thinking creatively about new distribution strategies.

This approach of integrating web services into desktop applications is becoming a trend. Google's beta version of its sidebar aggregates all kinds of information from the web and ties it in with a powerful Google search of your desktop--and its own Gmail product--but you can also set the bar to search the web. So the war is on--whose tools will appeal to the business customer more? Whose will save the most people the most time? I'd speculate that the battle that's just begun for possession of the desktop will determine what our working days will look like for the next five to ten years.