Adobe's announcement this month of a new version of Creative Suite worked on my memory like Proust's Madeleine cake in Remembrance of Things Past. The trigger was the way Adobe keeps saying, with monotonous regularity, that the product is not just a collection of programs but an integrated suite.

My mind was thus cast back to the IT of the 1980s when "integration" was a trendy selling point the first time round. Back then, a box that contained Lotus 1-2-3, Freelance Graphics and Manuscript was a bundle, not a suite.

Lotus Symphony, on the other hand, was an integrated package because it comprised a spreadsheet, word processor and database in one program. Applying this distinction today, Microsoft Office is not an integrated package, nor is Adobe Creative Suite 2.

However, software firms have devised ways to help users work with the programs in combination. Classic examples include Outlook Today in Microsoft Office, and that hideous desktop drawer thing in Lotus SmartSuite.

Even Adobe Creative Suite 2 - a graphics package, remember - has a Bridge application that lets you keep track of single and grouped documents, versions, network projects, recent files and common suite settings, while providing daily power-user tips, hotlinks to Adobe's support site and an integrated Really Simple Syndication (RSS) reader for your own use.

In other words, the software companies have indulged in joined-up thinking and developed a program or some other underlying technology that glues the components together.

While reminiscing about those days when my waist was narrower than my shoulders, I was jolted to the present by the ringing of my office phone. Picking up the receiver, I was immediately sent back to the 1980s once again. It sounded like the caller was using an early hands-free car phone while driving through the Dartford Tunnel. Either that or he was doing an impersonation of Norman Collier gargling mouthwash.

As it turned out, my caller was in fact sitting at his desk in central London. The problem was that he was one of the million or so registered users of internet phone service Skype, and he was using Skype- Out to connect his voice over IP (VoIP) call to my landline. Normally it works fine, he said. Actually, what he said was, "NrrrRRAAHHHlly schrzt wkx eye." But since he only used the service for outgoing calls, how would he know?

It puts him on the same level as the mugs who bought first-generation analogue mobile phones for their business, leaving customers thinking they were talking to a catarrh-afflicted Darth Vader with a wasp in his helmet.

VoIP systems might leave financial directors drooling at the potential savings on phone charges, and users might find it easy to initiate calls, but who will want to receive those calls if they're unintelligible? As with integrated software suites, there is clearly a problem with getting the parts to work together, but in this instance the disparate bits seem to be stuck together not with glue but with spit and a prayer. It's time VoIP developers indulged in a bit of joined-up thinking too.