Call it the cloud...or hosted computing. The age of buying software in a box is on its way out. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. The way we buy and use programs to use on personal computers...hasn't changed a whole lot over the years. Floppy disks gave way to optical discs.....and the downloading of programs is pretty common too. But instead of having software stored on your PC...more and more is becoming available via the Internet....with nothing to download. Adobe is doing it...Google...and so is the biggest software company of them all, Microsoft. Business Division President Stephen Elop...

"Indeed what we announced is the immediate availability of capabilities of email and calendaring, portal and collaboration, delivered to customers from a hosted environment. Hosted in Microsoft data centers, delivered to customers over the Internet. So customers going forward have a choice. They can deploy this technology within their data centers, or they can take advantage of this environment from Microsoft in the cloud essentially. Or they can do the combination of both, which many customers are talking to us about. So it's an opportunity for customers to deploy technology in a way that is more cost effective, less distracting from a resource perspective and a better way to allocate their capital resources in tough economic times."

For consumers too...there may be advantages. When software becomes a service...you can access it from any personal computer. Microsoft says customers will save between 10 and 50 percent. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.