From: Adam Rifkin (adam@KnowNow.com)
Date: Sat Dec 30 2000 - 07:29:03 PST
Y2K, go away. Bring on 2001, the Year Of Web Services!!
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-201-4298495-0.html
It's a little curious that the article below spends all of its time on
the Big Five (Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Sun, and HP) and none of its time
mentioning the young new companies -- all started in the last 5 years --
who are the real voices of innovation in Web Services: BEA Systems,
Ariba, CommerceOne, webMethods, and Bowstreet.
For fun, here are the market caps of my twenty favorite public software
companies as of the end of 2000:
1. Microsoft (43) -- $231b
2. Oracle (29) -- $163b
3. IBM (85) -- $149b
4. EMC (66) -- $145b
5. Sun (28) -- $90b
6. Hewlett Packard (31) -- $62b
7. Qualcomm (82) -- $61b
8. SAP (34) -- $42b
9. Siebel (67) -- $29b
10. BEAS (67) -- $27b
11. i2 (54) -- $22b
12. Check Point (133) -- $21b
13. Adobe (58) -- $14b
14. Ariba (54) -- $13b
15. Peoplesoft (37) -- $11b
16. Tibco (48) -- $9b
17. Openwave (48) -- $8b
18. Mercury Interactive (90) -- $7b
19. CommerceOne (25) -- $5b
20. webMethods (89) -- $4b
(Informix at 2, Xerox at 4, Novell at 5, and SGI at 4 -- sigh.)
And, by comparison, a few other companies:
General Electric (48) -- $475b
Exxon Mobil (87) -- $302b
Pfizer (46) -- $291b
Cisco (38) -- $275b
Wal Mart (53) -- $237b
Citigroup (51) -- $229b
AIG (99) -- $228b
Nokia (43) -- $203b
Intel (30) -- $202b
Coca Cola (61) -- $151b
AOL Time Warner (35/52) -- $150b
Home Depot (46) -- $106b
Proctor and Gamble -- $102b
Berkshire Hathaway (71000) -- $101b
Philip Morris (44) -- $98b (up 85% this year!)
Nortel (32) -- $96b
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter (79) -- $89b
American Express (55) -- $73b
Qwest (41) -- $68b
AT&T (17) -- $67b
UPS (55) -- $66b
Amgen (64) -- $66b
Sony (69) -- $63b
Enron (83) -- $62b
Disney (29) -- $60b
Merrill Lynch (68) -- $55b
Goldman Sachs (107) -- $49b
Schlumberger (80) -- $46b
Lucent (13) -- $46b
McDonalds (34) -- $45b
Dell (17) -- $45b
JDS Uniphase (42) -- $40b
Juniper (126) -- $40b
Worldcom (14) -- $40b
Schwab (28) -- $39b
Veritas (87) -- $35b
General Motors (51) -- $29b
Compaq (15) -- $25b
Network Appliane (64) -- $21b
Brocade (92) -- $20b
Broadcom (84) -- $20b
Yahoo! (30) -- $17b
Palm (28) -- $16b
VeriSign (74) -- $15b
Fedex (40) -- $11b
Eastman Kodak (39) -- $11b
360 Networks (13) -- $10b
eBay (33) -- $8.8b
Amazon (15) -- $5.5b
ONI Systems (40) -- $5.0b
Apple (15) -- $4.8b
Citrix (22) -- $4.2b
InfoSpace (9) -- $2.8b
Akamai (21) -- $2.3b
CMGi (5) -- $1.8b
Realnetworks (9) -- $1.4b
Vitria (8) -- $1.0b
MicroStrategy (9) -- $760m
I could go on and on, but I won't. What was this post about? Oh yeah,
Web services...
> Web services: Few actually deliver
> By Mary Jo Foley
> Special to CNET News.com
> December 28, 2000, 7:25 a.m. PT
> Shrink-wrapped software is dead. Long live software as a service.
>
> That's likely to be the 2001 battle cry of software vendors. Many of
> them spent 2000 laying the groundwork for writing, distributing and
> using a new generation of Internet-enabled software.
>
> As the year drew to a close, vendors were racing to one-up each other,
> each claiming the best strategy for delivering on its Web services
> promises. In 2001, look for developers and some bleeding-edge customers
> to put vendors' claims--and early versions of their Web services
> wares--to the test.
>
> Defining terms
>
> At the moment, Web services are vaguely defined. For some companies,
> they are the infrastructure for future software applications and
> encompass directory, security, policy-management and other related
> services. For others, they are the protocols--such as Extensible Markup
> Language (XML), Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI),
> and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)--that more tightly couple
> software applications.
>
> For still others, Web services are the content that rides on top of the
> protocols--things like travel booking, currency translation and weather
> report services. And for a few, they are all those components plus the
> applications designed to run them over the Internet.
>
> "People already are using the Web for services," said Summit Strategies
> analyst Dwight Davis. "For example, lots of people are using
> Hotmail. The question is about the level of integration and
> sophistication of these Web services."
>
> Microsoft has held up its free email service as an example of a Web
> service-style application that uses the company's Passport
> Internet-authentication service. Both developers and customers will
> expect Web services to work together seamlessly, as vendors have claimed
> they would when discussing their Web services visions, Davis said.
>
> So are the industry leaders onto a hot trend? Or are the emperors
> parading around without clothes?
>
> Gartner noted in a market report in October that nearly every company
> making a play for enterprise customers had either introduced or said it
> would introduce a Web services strategy.
>
> Sun Microsystems, although not known first and foremost as a software
> vendor, will be one of the last to unveil its end-to-end Web services
> vision in early 2001.
>
> Sun executives maintain that the company was first to acknowledge the
> importance of services, ever since it coined the slogan "the network is
> the computer." But Sun's framework for tying together Java, Jini and the
> protocols they support won't be unveiled until the first quarter of next
> year, executives acknowledged.
>
> Promises to keep
>
> Meanwhile, companies that announced Web services strategies in 2000 will
> have to scramble to deliver on their myriad promises. That category
> includes Microsoft, which announced its Windows .Net strategy in June,
> and Oracle, which went public with its Dynamic Service Framework in December.
>
> Hewlett-Packard and IBM, too, are expected to use the coming year to put
> more flesh on their respective Web services bones.
>
> HP, as a number of analysts have acknowledged, was one of the first
> companies to outline a comprehensive vision for Web services with its
> "E-speak" application. Recently, however, the company has focused less
> on the grandiose vision and more on the concrete delivery details. The
> best evidence of that was a late-year decision to join backers of the
> UDDI standard, a proposed Yellow Pages for companies that want to do
> business electronically.
>
> IBM, for its part, has a lot of the building blocks in place to deliver
> services over the Web. While it doesn't have a catchy name for its Web
> services application--its "Application Framework for e-business" is not
> especially compelling--Big Blue does support all the related standards.
>
> Like Microsoft, IBM has tools as well as WebSphere and other middleware
> servers to provide the back-end infrastructure needed by Web services
> developers. Unlike Microsoft, IBM is shipping it all today. So far, IBM
> has yet to deliver Web services themselves, and it's unclear if the
> company intends to do so. Stay tuned in 2001.
>
> .Net or .Nyet?
>
> Speaking of Microsoft, the Redmond, Wash., software juggernaut is likely
> to be the most closely scrutinized of all Web services players, since it
> has been the most vocal about its intentions to dominate the
> software-as-service market.
>
> Microsoft shipped nearly all of the .Net Enterprise servers that it
> promised it would deliver in 2000 and trotted out a first beta of its
> .Net framework as part of its Visual Studio .Net tool suite.
>
> Going into 2001, Microsoft is expected to continue to beat the .Net drum
> and to trumpet what's expected to be its first non-Windows play for
> .Net: the porting of its .Net Compact Framework to applications that
> don't require an operating system (think refrigerators, not Palm
> handhelds), say sources close to the company. This should occur sometime
> in the first half of next year.
>
> But Microsoft needs more of a cross-application strategy if it's serous
> about proving that it's a Web services, not just a "Windows services,"
> company, industry watchers said.
>
> One developer dabbling with Visual Studio .Net said he understood
> Microsoft's vision for .Net--"to provide a standardized 'Web API'
> (application programming interface) for developers to design, develop
> and migrate services and applications functionality to the Internet
> using existing standards...to achieve a 'universal development
> platform.'"
>
> Nevertheless, said the developer, who requested anonymity, "until .Net
> is ported--if it ever is--to existing Unix and legacy platforms, I don't
> believe that many existing development departments and businesses who
> aren't using Wintel platforms will find all that much compelling about
> the .Net environment to make them undertake a platform switch to Wintel."
---- Adam@KnowNow.ComXSLT - Simple? Hell, no. Straight-forward? Maybe if you're an expert in functional programming. Immediately understandable? Not on your life.
XML Schemas - Simple? No, but I guess that's why we have XML Authority. Straight-forward? Nope. Immediately understandable? More understandable than XSLT, but that's not saying much.
SOAP - Simple? SOAP is fairly simple, but still leaves itself open to complexity. Straight-forward? Nah. Immediately understandable? It's definitely a leap in the right direction, but no.
XML Query - Anyone seen the algebra? Yikes!
RDF - Do I even have to answer these questions?
SVG - HA!
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