Some thoughts inspired by / borrowed from this article.
Web Services are either (both) depending on your point of view
- enhanced systems modularity and scale through a service-oriented architecture
- the creation of "independent party transaction network effects" through domain-specific protocol agreement, based fundamentally on common message schemas and conversation patterns
Lesson - Agreement on common formats and protocols can yield powerful network effects and unintended positive consequences.
We have made valiant efforts to glue together our content applications, but to this day editorial systems largely remain stovepipes with only very coarse-grained interaction - through largely-closed file formats and the clipboard. Vendors tease us with the power of componentized function, rich object models, schemas and persistent storage in the form of integrated application environments.
The big deal about a standards-based edit platform and news model is the fact that it's an attempt to get a higher level of interoperability between programs through agreement on schemas. Hopefully, toward the goal of bootstrapping network effects, and unintended/innovative consequences, on the client. We can define an extensible object model and persistence mechanism, as well a rich and extensible "relationship" mechanism that can be used to intertwingle news objects with that are somehow related to one another. Some kinds of stock relationships are obvious: common Author, common Artist, common Location, common Priority, etc. Some may be more subtle or domain-specific: common Project, common Client, common Contributors, or even manual and thus not-easily-described ties.
Currently, each content application has managed its own "documents" and "records" and "collections" as an island unto itself - each with its own indexing and interaction mechanisms, each with its own solution-building mechanisms. Imagine what "content management" might become in an era where collections of objects can be created, retrieved, cached, replicated, published in conjunction with service-oriented systems, yet one in which a variety of content creation and manipulation applications can effectively leverage common storage and synchronization mechanisms.
Of course, this cannot and will not happen overnight. It's unlikely that anyone will make the investment necessary to deconstruct and reconstruct mainstream applications unless there is an actual "fundable pain" that is clearly addressed by the new methods. But I do indeed think it will happen before too long - particularly in applications related to collaborative productivity and content management, and the "mobile" components of enterprise applications.
Again, using the WS-* analogy, developers will start to standardize from the ground up, with basic agreements on "envelope" (the most basic "item" schema) and, slowly but surely, domain-specific schemas for richer object and relationship types.
11:53:21 AM 
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