>
>
>The future of software may be a huge Internet-borne cloud of electronic
>offerings from which users can choose exactly what they want, says Ludwig
>Siegele
>
>STUART FELDMAN could easily be mistaken for a technology pessimist,
>disillusioned after more than 25 years in the business of bits and bytes. As a
>veteran software architect, the director of IBM's Institute for Advanced
>Commerce views programming as all about suffering--from ever-increasing
>complexity. Writing code, he explains, is like writing poetry: every word, each
>placement counts. Except that software is harder, because digital poems can
>have millions of lines which are all somehow interconnected. Try fixing
>programming errors, known as bugs, and you often introduce new ones. So far, he
>laments, nobody has found a silver bullet to kill the beast of complexity.
>
>But give Mr Feldman a felt pen and a whiteboard, and he takes you on a journey
>into the future of software. Revealing his background as an astronomer, he
>draws something hugely complex that looks rather like a galaxy. His dots and
>circles represent a virtual economy of what are known as web services--anything
>and everything that processes information. In this "cloud", as he calls it, web
>services find one another automatically, negotiate and link up, creating all
>kinds of offerings.
>
>Imagine, says the man from IBM, that you are running on empty and want to know
>the cheapest open petrol station within a mile. You speak into your cellphone,
>and seconds later you get the answer on the display. This sounds simple, but it
>requires a combination of a multitude of electronic services, including a
>voice-recognition and natural-language service to figure out what you want, a
>location service to find the open petrol stations near you and a
>comparison-shopping service to pick the cheapest one.
>
>But the biggest impact of these new web services, explains Mr Feldman, will be
>on business. Picture yourself as the product manager of a new hand-held
>computer whose design team has just sent him the electronic blueprint for the
>device. You go to your personalised web portal and order the components, book
>manufacturing capacity and arrange for distribution. With the click of a mouse,
>you create an instant supply chain that, once the job is done, will dissolve
>again.
>
>VISIONS, VISIONS EVERYWHERE
>
>All this may sound like a description of "slideware"--those glowing overhead
>presentations given by software salesmen that rarely deliver what they seem to
>promise. Yet IBM is not the only one with an ambitious vision. Hewlett-Packard,
>Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and a raft of start-ups are thinking along the same
>lines. Unless they have all got it wrong, companies, consumers and computers
>will one day be able to choose exactly what they want from a huge cloud of
>electronic offerings, via the Internet.
>
>The reality will take a while to catch up; indeed, it may turn out to be quite
>different from today's vision. But there is no doubt that something big is
>happening in the computer industry--as big as the rise of the PC in the 1980s
>that turned hardware into a commodity and put software squarely at the centre
>of the industry. Now it looks as though software will have to cede its throne
>to services delivered online.
>
>Not that software as we know it will disappear. Plenty of code will still be
>needed to make the new world of computing run, just as mainframe computers are
>still around, though in a much less dominant position. But the computer
>business will no longer revolve around writing big, stand-alone programs.
>Instead, it will concentrate on using software to create all kinds of
>electronic services, from simple data storage to entire business processes.
>
>The agent of change is the Internet. For a start, it has changed the nature of
>software. Instead of being a static program that runs on a PC or some other
>piece of hardware, it turns into software that lives on a server in the network
>and can be accessed by an Internet browser. Already, most big software firms
>offer versions of their programs that can be "hosted", meaning that they can be
>delivered as a service on the network.
>
>But more importantly, the Internet has turned out to be a formidable promoter
>of open standards that actually work, for two reasons. First, the web is the
>ideal medium for creating standards; it allows groups to collaborate at almost
>no cost, and makes decision-making more transparent. Second, the ubiquitous
>network ensures that standards spread much faster. Moreover, the Internet has
>spawned institutions, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and
>the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which have shown that it is possible to
>develop robust common technical rules.
>
>The first concrete result of all this was the open-source movement. Since the
>mid-1980s, thousands of volunteer programmers across the world have been
>collaborating, mostly via e-mail, to develop free software, often taking
>Internet standards as their starting point. Their flagship program is Linux, an
>increasingly popular operating system initially created by Linus Torvalds, a
>Finnish programmer.
>
>The emergence of web services is a similar story, even though at first glance
>it may not look like it. The computer industry and other business sectors are
>collectively developing the next level of Internet standards--the common glue
>that will make all these web services stick together. Hence the proliferation
>of computer-related acronyms such as XML, RosettaNet, ebXML, XAML, SOAP, UDDI,
>WSDL and so on. This alphabet soup illustrates a potential problem for the new
>web services: they too could become victims of their own complexity.
>
>Why should anyone care about this geeky stuff? One good reason is that software
>is one of the world's largest and fastest-growing industries. In 1999 the
>sector sold programs worth $157 billion, according to IDC, a market-research
>company; and software spending, which is increasing by 15% a year, influences
>investments of another $800 billion in hardware and services. The changes now
>under way are likely to reshuffle the industry completely. The next few years
>may make it clear which companies will end up on top.
>
>Moreover, the software sector could well become a model for other industries.
>Open-source communities, for example, are fascinating social structures.
>Similar communities could one day produce more than just good code. Thomas
>Malone, professor of information systems at the Massachusetts Institute of
>Technology, sees great opportunities ahead: "The Linux community is a model for
>a new kind of business organisation that could form the basis for a new kind of
>economy."