Sam Gentile says that Don Box needs to get out into the streets and talk to customers, and says that he would find, among other things:
No one cares about Web Services in real usage (only geeks think they’re cool).
Sam, I know you’re out working with customers, but maybe you should talk to a few more. I’ve worked with multiple clients using web services…including a multi-billion dollar travel services company, who have built and deployed web services (can’t deep link, click on “Galileo Web Services”) for their customers to use. With these services, they can get a new customer up in hours or days, rather than the weeks or months that it took previously. And they have unprecedented monitoring and control capabilities, and the ability to protect their legacy systems in a new way by encapsulating much of the old error-prone logic.
I’ve also worked with clients of these particular web services, and it’s even better from their perspective. No more screen scraping; no more wading through a 500-page manual of structured field specs; and no more waiting for months for a private data line to be installed. And even better, there are higher-level services provided to easily accomplish certain travel tasks that used to be very complex. We’re talking about weeks of development, reduced to a couple of days. Seriously.
So Don, I think you’re doing fine – and many real customers do care about this stuff.
You didn;t get the whole point of the post; he was suprised by the continued interest in his COM book and I talked about how much COM is being used and still developed in the real world. Maybe I should have left out the Web Services thing because now people will focus on the controversy instead of the real message here.
You so missed the whole point.
Sam, I so got the whole point.
I was just taking issue with one part of your post – the part about how Don should get out of the office and find out that no one really uses web services – because I disagree with that part.
The rest of what you said, about COM being extremely prevalent, is certainly true for many companies.
I am glad that you found a real use for a Web Service other than a stock quote service but in traveling the counttry for INETA and talking to 100’s of developers, I find great interest in WS among developers and 0% production usage among the people I have talked to. It’s unfournate as they offer great promise and in situations like yours are a great solution but I still contend that they are greatly overhyped and that the rhetoric coming out of Redmond is far more than their usage. YMMV.
But this should really be a separate post. I don’t want to break your link so I was wondering if you think I should move it to a separate post because really the COM post is more self-contained without it.
Regards,
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