As I type this, Microsoft is presenting another full-day song-and-dance on .Net–similar in many ways, I'm sure, to the Forum 2000 event of 2 years ago. The Wall Street Journal ran an article this morning panning Microsoft's progress on .Net, and suggested that Web services were not catching on in the “revolutionary” way that Microsoft had suggested they would.
Waaah, waaah, waaah.
The hype around Web services has been immense, and mostly vendor-driven. There's been a wide misunderstanding of what they really are–mostly because of Microsoft's pie-in-the-sky marketeering over the last 2 years. But the fundamental problem is that at their root, Web services are a software development methodology, not a product per se–and software developmement methodologies are really geeky and un-sexy.
I tried the other day to explain what web services were to a non-technical friend. His eyes wandered. He grew distracted. A shiny object captured his attention. I gave up.
Sean M. Gallagher 