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The apocryphal story goes that in 1899 the director of the US patent office declared: "Everything that can be invented has been invented."

If he did ever utter such words he was a tiny bit wrong - the US patent office alone is working through a backlog of 1.1 million applications - but I can see exactly why someone could reach that conclusion. And, at the risk of opening myself up to even more ridicule than Mr Duell, I think we're rapidly reaching the point where software can't get much better than it already is.

It was my old favourite, Microsoft Money, that started me pondering. The overwhelming response to the open letter we printed in last month's issue - imploring Microsoft to develop a new version for the UK - was that, yes, people wanted a new version. But many of those who wrote in were still happy with the old version, too. Perhaps surprisingly, some people are still using Money 97, but why not? It works well and they know it inside out.

I know exactly how they feel: at one point in my life I was producing a 24-page in-house magazine using Lotus AmiPro 3.1 and, by the end of my three-year stint, I swear I could do things with that program even its developers couldn't have envisaged.

Ten years later and it's Word 2007 that performs my daily word-processing chores. It's undoubtedly a great piece of software, but how fundamentally different is it from AmiPro? Give the old Lotus dog a cosmetic update, replace the menus with the Ribbon, and I doubt the overwhelming majority of

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users would spot the difference.

This trend can be seen in all sorts of areas of software development. Operating systems, OCR software, speech recognition, disc burning - year by year, the improvement curve is flattening out. It's arguably this, rather than any great failure on Microsoft's part, that resulted in Vista going down like a lead balloon (or, in Microsoft's ingenious take, a rip-roaring success).

It leaves the companies that create software in a tricky position. Some of them have opted for inventing bizarre terms that could have been lifted straight from shampoo adverts to add dramatic new tick boxes to their marketing materials. Others are shifting their focus to web apps, while a niche few are fortunate enough to still be improving their software in big leaps year on year.

Luckily, most will be kept busy as they shift their attention to creating integrated online/offline versions of their software, and with all the buzz around Adobe AIR, Google Gears and Microsoft Silverlight there's no sign of an imminent collapse of the software industry. But it does leave a lovely clear space for open-source software to invade.

And there's every sign of the invasion succeeding. A number of open-source apps support the Open Financial eXchange (OFX) format popularised by Money, so the banks don't need to worry about the fact that one of the key services they offer - integration with financial software - will continue while Microsoft gets attracted by lower-hanging, more profitable fruit.

We haven't yet put such apps through the PC Pro wringer, so I can't comment on their quality, but if the open-source software I do use frequently is anything to go by (Firefox and FileZilla in particular) then there are bound to be some pearls.

But the fact I'm even writing this would have been astonishing five years ago: for Microsoft to abandon a market-leading product and leave open-source software alone as a replacement was unheard of. It may also be a sign of things to come. By 2018, not only could all the desktop software we use be free, it could also be open source.