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The time has come to change the National Curriculum's archaic approach to biology. Its list of key functions of animals, alongside the scholastic tedium of respiration and titillation of reproduction, lacks the most important of all: optimism. For it is optimism that drives so much of animal behaviour, even bodily functions such as respiration (dum spiro spero, 'while I breathe, I hope') and irrepressibly reproduction.

As a self-professed 'higher' animal, the human inevitably has higher if not consummate optimism. Confronted with anything excessive or even hazardous, humans devise some means of indulging in that excess or hazard, package it neatly, and sell it online. Cold water kills quickly, so we surf and sail to the limit. Snow makes motion miserable and freezes flesh, so we build ski resorts and take annual winter sports holidays. Even the radioactive region around Chernobyl has become a tourist spot.

So with computing. With more than half the world unable to connect by dial-up, we few are busy devising ingenious schemes that squander our bandwidth. While internecine disputes over iPlayer between the BBC and ISPs probably centre on the latter's rival plans for clogging our communications with online movies, and the fact that the BBC has no profit to share with them, others want to rip our computers apart.

Long before the Internet, personal computers replaced dumb terminals that did all their business on mainframes. Individual users were empowered with their own computer, storage and software. The rise in networking let sysadmins repossess some of the power they had lost, as users of corporate

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systems were forced to boot their PCs from servers, run networked applications, and store their documents centrally. The next step could be 'Office Over Internet' (OOI) in which everyday tasks, such as word processing, are further removed from local to remote servers.

Already you can try this with Google Docs and Spreadsheets at docs.google.com/?hl=en_GB, which originated as the Writely word processor. But no matter how well it might try to dress up your browser, its total lack of integration with keyboard shortcuts - and much more - make it an ungainly experiment at best. FCKeditor (fckeditor.net) may be doing quite nicely as a niche 'rich' text editor in ColdFusion and Oracle Application Express, ThinkFree Office (thinkfree.com/common/main.tfo) can be quite usable at times, and there is always gOffice for your iPhone (goffice.com). But these are hardly the tools of choice for the budding JK Rowlings of the world.

If they are to be believed, Virtual Ubiquity, now part of Adobe, has the solution in Buzzword, launching into education and for 'non-enterprise individuals' in the spring of next year according to virtub.com. Although their mock-up screenshots look sexy, I fail to see how they will succeed where the sophisticated iStorm (mathgamehouse.com/istorm) has failed to take off, tackling issues that collaborative editors like SubEthaEdit (codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit) already master.

With iWork 08 finally becoming a worthy upgrade to AppleWorks and NeoOffice maturing nicely, Microsoft is doing itself no favours with more inexcusable delays in Office 2008. While I don't think that many of us will opt for this experimental generation of OOI solutions - as their main novelty is in trying to solve problems that we do not have - the ultimate loser in all this has to be Microsoft Office.