Today’s Journal features a Portals column by Vauhini Vara that represents yet another attempt to gauge how far Web apps have come by attempting to “live on the Web,” forsaking all desktop-based software. (Others — like James Fallows in 2006 in Technology Review, whose effort I wrote about back then — have done this before.)

The trouble with this approach is that it’s a total straw man. No one would ever do this except to provide column fodder. The shifts in our software habits are incremental; we don’t “change state” 100 percent, we just drift in one direction. And the drift today is overwhelmingly towards the Web.

Of course Vara finds the trouble spots exactly where you’d expect: If you’re tied in to a corporate email system, giving up Outlook for a Web interface is still painful. Spreadsheets and PDFs are harder to work with. Web-based writing tools are pretty good but so far they haven’t provided a good replacement for Word’s clumsy but essential “track changes” feature.

OK. In the meantime, those of us who aren’t locked in to Outlook long ago went with Gmail or some other Web-based email system. We keep and share our calendars on the Web, and increasingly we use Web-based tools to coordinate small work groups. No one is holding a gun to our heads, so we happily mix Web apps and desktop apps. Why not?

If you’re starting a small business today, are you going to invest in Outlook or are you just going to piggyback on some Web service? When the business begins to grow, are you going to pay the big Outlook tax or stick with what’s working? As developers devise new useful tools for communication and coordination, are they introduced on the desktop or on the Web — or in both places?

These are the trends that matter. “All or nothing” is beside the point.