Google and Amazon are exceptions that demonstrate the rule. In Google's case they're making a limited usage form of their service available for free, with the expectation that if people come up with good applications they'll either charge for usage or gain revenue some other way - it's under their control, since the beta license keys are only authorized for 1000 requests per day. In Amazon's case, they want as many people as possible to buy from them, and if making their catalog and ordering system available through a web service adds a tiny fraction of a percent to their sales they'll have more than justified the effort.
The same types of benefits could apply to other major commercial operations - the airlines, for instance, should have web services interfaces in place, as should Amazon's competitors in the book biz, major office supplies vendors, stock brokers, etc. - these all have more to gain from additional business than from restricting users to browsers. The credit card processing business would be another great market for web services, except that they always seem to be using technology that's a minimum of 10 years out of date (my apologies to any readers from that industry - I'm baffled and frustrated that there's still a minimum merchant charge of about $0.40 / transaction in these days of cheap bandwidth and processing).
Where web services are increasingly important to a much broader range of companies is for linking B2B applications, including B2B applications within a company. SOAP is basically just a fluffier - and somewhat more limited - version of CORBA, after all. These types of services are generally not public, though.
- Dennis
Dennis M. Sosnoski
Enterprise Java, XML, and Web Services Support
http://www.sosnoski.com
RXZ JLo wrote:
they are all toy services at xmethods and salcentral.
I am looking for more like Google and Amazon.
Thanks,
rf.
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