In today's global economy, organizations are expanding their market opportunities by extending their reach. Mergers and acquisitions, new partnerships, and new business models - including e-business and Web services - are changing the way companies interact with their customers, and with each other. Yet these same initiatives are creating tremendous challenges for the IT groups faced with making it all work.

One of the ingrained attitudes in the United States is the desire to simplify choices to a binary decision. Black or white. Coffee or tea. Winner or loser. Even our expressions reflect this ­ 'two-horse race,' 'two-party system.' And it's no different in the world of Web services. On the one hand, we have the entire world of Microsoft's .NET initiative. On the other hand we have the many-headed beast known as Java. Java or .NET. Seems simple enough.

By now we've all heard a fair bit about Web services, a lot of hype and few hints that there's something really innovative going on here. Trudge round any developer conference and you'll hear the chatter of eager developers wanting to roll together a host of disparate Web services into the most fantastic and powerful applications the enterprise has ever seen.

In a recent 'Strategic Planning' research note, Gartner issued a prediction that 'by 2004, more than 25 percent of all standard Web services traffic will be asynchronous....' and 'by 2006, more than 40 percent of the standard Web services traffic will be asynchronous.'

As the new year finally starts to take hold, we're seeing a number of interesting, challenging, and even disturbing trends in the world of Web services. One of the more interesting business intelligence reports predicted recently that Web services will hit the height of its 'hype curve' midway through this year. In case you've never seen the hype curve, it's a curve with a sharp rise at the near end, and a gradual slope downward. The beginning of the curve signifies nascent products - things that are known only to small numbers of folks and are usually still fairly immature. The height of the curve is the point of widespread interest, with some early adoption but also a great deal of wait-and -see attitude. The downturn of the curve is where the technology finally becomes mainstream. Some technologies never make it to the top of the curve; others linger there and never make it to acceptance.

There's an old story about what happens when several blind men encounter an elephant. One, feeling the leg, says that an elephant is like a tree. Others, touching various other parts of the elephant's anatomy, describe it as other things. The point of the story, besides not hiring blind men to do anatomical surveys, is that depending upon your perspective, a particular object can look different.

Wireless, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Mention wireless, and you can step back and watch the conversation spin for hours around differing definitions and approaches. In some minds, wireless is all about cell phones, and consequently is a completely consumer-oriented market. To others, wireless includes a much larger host of technologies, including things like wireless networks, PDAs, cell phones, and other embedded or proprietary devices, things like the pad UPS hands you to sign for your delivery. And to some it's a question of consumer versus industrial applications.

I've described elsewhere the idea of 'swarms' - spontaneously federating devices and software services connecting over networks. Some people are now describing this concept as 'wireless Web services,' extending the group of ideas now being called services-on-demand.

I'm showing my age, but a number of years ago ELO released an album entitled 'Discovery.' One of the songs was entitled 'Shine a Little Light,' which is apropos for this month's editorial since our feature focus for this edition is Discovery. I took part in a panel discussion on Web services during our Web Services Edge East show in New York City at the end of September. A number of very august industry representatives joined me, including James Gosling, Rick Ross, and David Litwack. The panel covered a number of topics that are on the minds of anyone considering Web services, and one of the topics that received a great deal of attention was Discovery.

Reusable software components - when properly built, promoted, and tracked - deliver an enormously productive alternative to traditional 'built-from-scratch' application development. The benefits are real, tangible, and ultimately reflected in the bottom line for those organizations with the wisdom to recognize software reuse as an adaptation of the same concept that made Henry Ford famous and very, very rich. Web services, when held to the same standards of construction, promotion, and tracking, offer the same benefits. The advantages of component-based development (CBD) apply equally to service-based development (SBD) - better, faster, cheaper creation of software solutions.

The software industry returned to New York City with the International Java & Web Services Conference and Expo at the Hilton New York. In spite of what many thought might prove insurmountable obstacles, the international software industry has provided New York City today with a resounding indication that heavy hearts and thoughts are not to be permitted to become a barrier to returning to the business of business, including the Internet technology business.

One of the most interesting paradoxes of the information age is the challenge of obtaining critical mass for a technology - the classic chicken-and-egg problem. Remember when you could buy your software on floppy disks because only a few people had CD-ROM drives? How about the plethora of high-density floppy drive replacements?

I sometimes think that the best job in the world would be strategic thinking. Every time I see a quote from a strategist, it's always five years out and full of promise. You know the ones I mean. It goes something like this: 'By 2005 every wristwatch will have a Pentium 7 processor and 2 GB RAM, with voice recognition and holographic screen projection.' It seems like nice work, and there's no burden of delivery. It's even better than being the weatherman.

Recently I have fielded questions from customers like, 'Which is better, peer-to-peer or Web services?' and 'Do you think I should move from Web services to a peer-to-peer network?'. The answer is another question: 'Which approach best suits your solution?'. This tends to make the customer think about system requirements a little more, so that once an interaction model is better defined a more informed choice can be made.

Without a doubt, 2001 is a rebuilding year. The market is down, especially the tech stocks. The dot-coms that were leading the charge are now the dot bombs that we're all trying to distance ourselves from. So it might be easy to conclude that the Internet revolution is over, and the bad guys won. But that would be naïve, and more than a little premature.

Being left handed and, therefore, left footed, I once tried to take dancing lessons so I'd look a little less ungainly at family functions like weddings. My father, who's ambidextrous, makes it look easy. Of course, I always forget that when he was growing up, dancing was the main social activity. Naturally I found it much more difficult than it looks.