Behind the scenes in the 'digital decade'

Everyone is quoting Winston Churchill these days, even Bill Gates. In his Comdex keynote address, Gates intoned: "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." By which Gates meant that the technology boom isn't fading--we've just witnessed the end of the first phase, which will give way to a grand new "digital decade" that's only just begun.

I wholeheartedly admire such aggressive optimism (especially when you compare it with Larry Ellison's defeatist lament that if he had to do it over again, he'd be in biotech). But the direction Gates' speech went after the rallying cry was predictable: a promotionfest for new Microsoft products and technologies, notably Windows XP, the Xbox, and the Tablet PC. Sandwiched in between were a few offhand references to .Net--the initiative Gates has "bet the company" on--and a mostly applause-free demo of Web services.

Compare that mix of topics with Gates' speech a couple of weeks before at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC)--where .Net and Web services were the constant refrain--and you have one emerging truth about the new digital decade: Most of the important stuff is going to happen behind the scenes where end users can't see it.

In the grand scheme of things, XP, the Xbox, and the Tablet PC aren't going to matter much to the forthcoming digital decade. One the other hand, interconnecting systems using Web services will matter a whole lot--but by and large it's a boring and confusing topic for ordinary users, who grumble: Who cares about .Net? Wasn't everything supposed to be all interconnected already?

That's one reason I found Gates' Comdex Web services demo intriguing: It offered one of the few clear illustrations I've seen of Web services benefits to end users. At the PDC, Gates had announced that the Office XP Web Services Toolkit would be available later this year. At the Comdex keynote, a .Net systems engineer demonstrated that you could use the Toolkit to build an Excel expense form that would automatically extract all your expenses from your credit card company using XML over HTTP. (Of course, that would require that a credit card company actually offer that service, but the point was well-taken.)

It left me wondering whether the main, public face of Web services will in fact be Microsoft Office. You may have a J2EE Web services platform in the back office, connecting to private marketplaces or exposing legacy systems. And of course Web services plumbing may be behind spiffy new applications created by enterprise developers. But as a wise VC once said, "Excel is really the killer enterprise app." It wouldn't surprise me if the Office XP Toolkit turned out to be the sleeper hit of the season, providing an easy way for developers to experiment with publicly available Web services--stock feeds, currency converters, and so on.

Just think of the tedious user interface development you could avoid. If you've already been experimenting with Web services--say, you've created an object that fetches and transforms data from a legacy system--you could even publish that Web service to an internal UDDI directory. The Toolkit supports UDDI, making it easy to start hooking up Office documents to Web services left and right, though of course you have to be careful of the data you make available.

Recently, a CTO who asked not to be identified said, "The whole Web services thing is just a way for Microsoft to exploit the work that's being done in the open-source community and add value to Windows desktop applications." Whether that's the case, hooking up Office docs to Web services could be a relatively painless way to get warmed up for the wild ride in the next digital decade.

Clarification:BEA would like you to know that the application server market share numbers I quoted from Giga Information Group--36 percent for BEA's WebLogic and 34 percent for IBM's WebSphere--were projected for this year and not actual. BEA also observes that numbers from Meta Group and Gartner show WebLogic with a double-digit lead--and that WebLogic had a version for AS/400 before IBM did.

Do Office apps have a role in the new wave of enterprise integration? Or do they just get in the way? E-mail Eric or Talk Back below.