Apps: What with Salesforce.com opening its Apex Code so customers can tailor CRM as well as rechristening its offering as PaaS, as in platform-as-a-service, and Google’s acquisition of Postini last week, “we are finally starting to see critical mass build around SaaS,” Ephraim Schwartz writes in SaaS gains enterprise cred. “With development, security, and compliance out of the way, there aren’t many hurdles left for SaaS to clear before it becomes the dominant force in the software industry and the enterprise.” Related: New Salesforce.com version unmasks Apex Code.Columnist’s corner: A dream job gone immediately wrong is this week’s Off the Record tale, sent awry by management that considered the news-related Web site piece of its business to be little more than necessary burden. “I saw it as a diamond in the rough and I couldn’t wait to polish,” writes our author in The war of hidden motives. “I learned quickly that our job was to exist and do as little as possible. My direct boss didn’t help matters much. She was a newscaster with a megawatt smile and no training in any type of technology.” Moonlight upgrades, unauthorized changes and no one to stop them translated into what the boss thought was some sort of magic once they made it to the live Web site. Even so, a battle erupted in which both the boss and the head of technology had a vendetta that went unexplained. “I learned a valuable lesson: In business, people act for many reasons that are usually not the ones they claim.” Gripe Line: Windows Vista compatibility problems hit a new low with Roxio’s Easy Media Creator 9. “Readers say that not only does the program have many problems working with Vista, the fixes promised by Roxio are beginning to look like so much vaporware,” Ed Foster reports. That, despite the fact that one might otherwise presume the software to be as compatible as possible with Microsoft’s new OS. It’s already garnered Microsoft’s certification logo, after all. One reader encountered a conflict with an incompatible driver, Roxio’s no less. The subsequent call to tech support was even worse. A second reader points out that such problems have been here all along. In the end, though, “those who believe that a ‘Windows Vista Certified’ logo means there will be no problems are perhaps themselves certifiable.” Software Development