Like a Glam Rocker... which platforms should I go with?

There comes a time when life has moved on... new stuff happens (sometimes called 'technology') and people work, or want to work, in different ways.

So they then look at what stuff they have (i.e. the technology they use currently) and decide, for example,

• 'it is very irritating to not be contactable when I'm out of the office... maybe I do need one of those new fangled mobular cell-type phones the yuppies have!'

or

• 'instead of wasting time sending leaflets through the post that nobody reads, I should send direct email marketing so I can exactly track and measure who has opened what and what the clicked on, to help follow-ups'

or even

• 'maybe if we got a decent website, we could sell stuff directly to the punters and cut out the huge numbers of middle-people'.

Well, we're currently in that kind of place, thinking 'what we've been doing so far is fine and dandy and has won awards and no one's complained about it really, but what we really need is to drag our Web 0.0 system into the 21st century and prepare it for the great Web 2.48 world where we're all interconnected and we have social networking integrated with the content delivery, integrated with folksonomies, integrated with e-commerce, integrated with collaborative wikis; and all of it held on a cloud somewhere over the Atlantic'.

But to do everything we want, there are so many options. Should we go down the route of the huge expensive monolithic products from IBM (Portal) or MicroSoft (Sharepoint) which can do everything we want but will cost us two arms and half a leg every year forever in license fees... or do we go down the open source route and get a system built on Joomla or Elgg or Moodle or Wibble or FlimFlam; which will be far cheaper, and can probably do everything we want and more (but we can't really see a case of that right now) but seems a little, as someone said, 'stickle-brick' - with little add-ons and so on. Will that see us through for another 10 or 20 years? Or will it be so hackable in 5 years' time that we'll have to spend three arms and four legs every year on security measures to stop the hackers hacking?

It's all very irritating... why can't we just have one system for everyone? And we then build on that... one social network (not Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, Xing, Plaxo, Friendster...), one blogging system (not Blogger.com, Wordpress, Livejournal etc.) one Wiki system... and everything will be eternally forwards and backwards compatible with everything?

Well... I know the answer, but it's not easy. Given the money, the big boys seem like a good safe bet. But it's a lot of money. So at what point should one go with the new systems?

Is Firefox better than I.E.? Well... some of the sites I need to use don't work well on Firefox. And when it's left open for days at a time it seems to eat my RAM like a salt through a slug... in short... I'm flummoxed. Gut feelings are all well and good but once you've taken antacids, you have to think with your head. And that, at present, is in two minds (not an easy trick!).