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RE: SOAP and the Web

• To: 'Mark Baker' <distobj@a...>
• Subject: RE: SOAP and the Web
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Wed, 1 May 2002 17:06:21 -0500
• Cc: 'xml-dev' <xml-dev@l...>

The problem of arguing the network effect as an incentive 
is it assumes everyone wants to be popular when some merely 
want to be close to those they choose.  Business services 
aren't group gropes; they are secret societies with 
secret incantations.  They are communities that self 
select through sharing vocabularies and by this, they 
accumulate and conserve wealth among their members. 

Classic keiretsu.

What if the network effect is deliberately limited and this 
is precisely the sensitive requirement?   They don't want 
to grow it; they want to control its growth, and by that, 
I don't mean the SOAP system vendors; I mean their customers.

Not surprisingly, web services, that is, roll your own API, 
is a return to the "play your own game" approach:  wealth made 
through sharing some aspects of the system, but differentiation 
based on aspects that are private, that do lock in the buyer 
for the duration of a contract, but don't lock them out 
of another system as long as it can process the same SOAP 
messages.  The lock-in is the message set. 

Like the StorySpace example in the article, the motivations 
to build services are self-sustaining and self-modifying, so 
it can win because it has a different definition of winning 
than a game based on achieving a network effect of a user 
interface;  the effect is based on the message set, the 
transaction types.  The client is irrelevant except insofar 
as it is convenient (you don't need HTML, XForms, SVG, 
but they are convenient).

I do know about the difficulty of getting a common schema 
out of an industry. One man's ontology is another man's heresy.  
Getting vocabulary agreements in place is the two-headed 
alligator of the markup industry: 

  two heads, both have teeth, it can't sh*t, is always cranky and wants to go in 
  different directions so mainly just sits there and bites anyone who comes 
  too close.

The SOAP part is easy.  The message set is hard.

len


From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@a...]


FWIW, here's a great paper on network effects in hypertext systems;

http://www1.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/papers/whitehead_ht99.html

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