Here's a transcript of a video of Omri Gazritt at Microsoft explaining the meaning of Web Services and why they are important.

C9: What does Microsoft get out of this? In other words, why should I help Microsoft get richer by adopting, help you get your pay check?
...
OG: Seriously, the more we reach into the enterprise, the more we realized how heterogeneous the environments are. Hence, doing this, for Microsoft helps us be able to sell more of our software to that space. And it's something our customers just demand of us. He says, hey, I have a J2EE environment today on the server. I would love to bridge clients out there except a little detail. All that stuff runs on some other vendor's platform, and your stuff runs on Windows. Can you make it work for me?

SOAP and web services could theoretically make it easy for different apps, databases, web sites, etc. to work together!

All well and good in theory, but I can barely get VB.NET to talk to the AdWords API from Excel VBA, so I kinda wonder who's going to be making their ERP on Sun talk to their J2EE middleware on Linux and have the result show up on the Windows desktop in Firefox...

The upshot, as Simon Fell says, is that "Interop is hard"... True enough, e.g. the PocketSOAP wsdl tool can't grok the AdWords API wsdl without getting "Type Mismatch" errors...

¶ 2/15/2005