Where some companies stay behind with their huge and too expensive applications that hardly run in a browser, IBM is leading us into the age of Corporate 2.0 with ManyEyes : a "shared visualization and discovery" service.

As part of an ongoing effort to deliver social computing software, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today launched "Many Eyes," an innovative new service that allows people to explore different visual representations of large amounts of data and share it with others to help them collectively make better sense of the information.(Press Release)

We all deal with data that we'd like to understand better. It may be as straightforward as a sales spreadsheet or fantasy football stats chart, or as vague as a cluttered email inbox. But a remarkable amount of it has social meaning beyond ourselves. When we share it and discuss it, we understand it in new ways.(Many Eyes)

I'm not too sure this si something we should be enthousiastic about, but hey, it's one step forward and therefore one step further away from those awful Office Suites certain companies try to sell us at a ridiculous price. I won't name names.