Microsoft and its rivals, like I.B.M. (news/quote) and Sun Microsystems
(news/quote), are scrambling to supply businesses with these services, which
will allow computers to share data across the Internet and, when so
programmed, handle all kinds of tasks without human intervention.
A Web service application, for example, might link a company's inventory
database with that of its suppliers, so parts would be automatically
reordered when supplies ran low. A car's navigation computer - an
increasingly common feature in new automobiles - could be linked to a
region's traffic-tracking database with a Web services application. That
would make constantly updated traffic reports available for helping the
driver find the least- congested route home.
To corporations, the promise of Web services is both in automation to cut
costs and in new offerings for consumers. Web services appear to be an
exception to the trend of an overall slump in technology spending.
"This is the year that a lot of investments are being made," said David M.
Smith, an analyst at Gartner Inc. (news/quote), which estimates that sales
of Web services software will increase fivefold, to $21 billion, by 2005.
Web services are at the center of Microsoft's plans, said Eric Rudder, a
senior vice president, "and the tools effort is the key to success or
failure."
The new programming platform cost $2 billion to develop, Mr. Rudder
observed, but that cost is "nothing compared to the opportunity."
Much of Microsoft's success over the years can be traced to its
understanding of and catering to rank-and- file developers. They are the
architects, designers and bricklayers of the information age, building the
software that animates everything from the world's financial markets to fuel
injectors in trucks.
Sounds like more layers of human labor are in the process of being rendered superfluous to the production and distribution of commodities and services. Profit without or rather with increasingly diminishing value (human labor). I smell incongruity or in the language of Marx a "big contradiction" in a system based on the buying and selling of labor-power.
But, hey, lets give it another twenty years or so and see what happens.
MP
