RE: What are web services good for? (WAS: RE: Two new features o f th e Web)

[David Orchard <orchard@pacificspirit.com>]

Mike,

The article that you quote is on aspnews.com.  ASP news promotes and covers 
the Application Service Provider industry, which is effectively the browser 
web service industry.  From an ASPs perspective, allowing programmatic 
access in addition to their current browser access is probably their next 
big thing.  I've worked in the ASP industry, and all the ASPs are adding 
programmable XML interfaces.  And further, ASPs are the only companies out 
there generating revenue from the browser web service model, and they are 
the only ones trying to start making money from the xml web service model. 
 Sun/Microsoft/BEA etc. sell into ASPs but don't make money from the 
service offering.  Given the ASP business model, and where they are going 
to expand, they are the ones that are the closest to ground-zero of any xml 
web services revolution.

Having said that, I do have some serious technical and business model 
issues with all the web services hype.  It's a lot harder than some vendors 
want to admit.

Cheers,
Dave Orchard

On Tuesday, August 21, 2001 11:01 AM, Champion, Mike 
[SMTP:Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com] wrote:
>
> <snip/>
>
> I'm glad you posted this question ... I was about to do the same thing.
> Irrespective of the details of SOAP, UDDI/WSDL/whatever, .NET ... why has
> this become the "next big thing?"  As previous discussions have 
indicated,
> "web services" are not all that much different from what people can do 
with
> the Web today (OK, Web services are for machines, not people ...) and 
we've
> been able to do remote procedure calls on Unix for decades, over 
COM/CORBA
> for years ... what's the big deal?  Why do I see assertions such as 
"There's
> little argument that XML Web services are the future of computing"
> http://www.aspnews.com/trends/article/0,2350,9921_868321,00.html every 
time
> I look at the trade press?
>
<snip/>