Web Services: The Next Business Model of the Internet

Clay Shirky: Web Services is more of a technological infrastructure than it is a business model right now.

I think web services will be infrastructure and not a business model forever. The industry must have learned something from the .com fiasco.

Clay Shirky: With the Web you have an HTTP request out and HTML back. The thing that knows how to make a HTTP request doesn't know how to serve an HTTP request. And the thing that knows how to send HTML doesn't know how to read HTML.... With Web Services, if you can read SOAP you can write SOAP. If you can write SOAP you can read SOAP.

Nicely put. Lots of goodness can happen because of this subtle difference.

A number of people have pointed out that Microsoft isn't a private enterprise, but a public one. As such, deleting the source code and going home may not be an option. Of course, they are right.

However, I think my basic point still stands. If conditions make continued work on Windows unprofitable, the right thing to do for the shareholders would be to not put any more resources into it. If working on it involves only a mindless reworking of code using a legal brief as a specification, who would want to be on the team?

Gates: Complying 'Not Feasible'. Microsoft chief Bill Gates says certain proposed antitrust remedies could force the company to stop selling Windows, a charge vehemently denied by an attorney for the states. By Declan McCullagh and Robert Zarate. [Wired News]

Ultimatly, the people who run Microsoft could decide to delete all the source code and go home. Microsoft is a private enterprise run for fun and profit. If you take the fun and profit out of it, why bother? (Why, yes, I'm still reading Atlas Shrugged, how did you know?)

It is a good thing he doesn't know that Microsoft's internal setup tools are called "Darwin".