37 Signals offer a variety of hosted services(tadalists,basecamp,campfire,backpack etc), each of which does one thing well. They have a new product coming out called “encompass” which basically is your integration, it brings all the apps together.

The problem you are talking about seems to be, what happens if you use a load of different programs, from different companies.

For example, If I use Mozilla Sunrise for calendar, Evolution for Email, tomboy for taking notes, and abiword for collaborative documents, then I am in the exact same state you describe, but on the desktop. I will be importing and exporting to beat the band in either case.

There is a cycle in software, in my opinion, that people want “tiny apps that do one thing well” for a while, then they get pissed off, and want one behemoth (i.e. OpenOffice/MS Office/Office Live) that does everything, and does everything alright. Then give it a few years, and we’re back to wanting small apps that do one thing and one thing well again.

Google, incidentally, bought Writely, a Web Word Processor, they have a calendar on the way (CL2 is its temporary name), and already have Google Chat running through the web browser. So they are going with the web based behemoth.

Office Live is the same thing again, so it looks like you’ll be getting what you wanted.

Personally, I don’t mind using a couple of different tools, and as for “who owns my chatlogs” I don’t give a fuck. I have a copy of each of them, thats what matters to me. You said (earlier in person) that you wanted it in “XML”, but i don’t know why.

It sounds like you are inventing problems, that don’t need solutions.