Web Services - slower adoption

Mark Baker was right about Web Services last year:

I predicted that XMethods would list less than 400 services by today, and lo-and-behold, that's the case; they list 366.

He also has a challenge for web services promoters

So here's a challenge to Web services promoters; make a prediction about the number of Web services available on the Internet by the end of 2004 and/or 2005. If they're so great, then surely, at some point, there's going to be thousands of them, right? When will that be? At this rate, they won't get to 1000 until 2010 ... assuming the hype - which is the only thing keeping them even linear, IMO - lasts that long.

Here's the thing - Web Services are simply the latest incarnation of distributed services - we've had various proprietary RPC services, DCA, CORBA, DCOM, and now Web Services. Notice how all of them have been promoted (in their time) by the large consulting firms and the trade rags, and how all of them have been used by a relatively small number of projects. The plain truth is, not that many projects really need complex distribution mechanisms. Most apps look a lot like this:

• Read data from a store (db, files, etc)
• Modify data
• Dump data back to the store

Where in that mix do most people need complex distribution? That's right, nowhere...