These days, you won’t always have immediate access to everyone who works on a given project. Maybe some aspects are being handled by freelancers. Maybe members of your team work remotely. Maybe you just aren’t in the office today. No matter how your team is distributed, you need to be able to assign tasks, share files, and manage your projects from anywhere. These applications offer the ability to do so from any Internet connection.
Yes, reality not only for distributed workers.
So, while the value of lists like these (10 Best Project Management Tools) can be questioned (hey, who decides what makes them the “Best”? and even “Who says it’s applications to begin with?”) they offer an overview of what’s marketplace norm in terms of functionality.
And yes, it will be interesting to watch the fight between the SaaS offerings and the open source contenders (like in 11 Open source project management tools), especially when we see collaboration as the overall goal. Focussing our views and goals for collaboration on “projects” alone is limiting – hence the best tools are adaptive and offer room for emergent uses.