>Frankly, I had been of the opinion that Web Services (a-la-SOAP) would have lots of uses, but mainly within internal applications and only very specialized external utility type services.

Yes, thats what we can do with it today, thats the point I was made in teh conclusion. ARS Solutions is finding ways to solve problems with Web services that we're very happy with. Most of it, is like you say geared towards being consumed in our own applications, however we've done what we can in order to let other applications use or services too.

>I do think that there is a very good chance that things will take off wildly some time in the future. Now that we have 2ghz+ hardware though, there may be other things that take off first, maybe even leaving web services in the dust.

Very true. This is also something I've been thinking about for a while, always wondering when we'll turn full circle again. Everytime there is a new way of doing things in this industry its often just tools that allow you to do things that our hardware can't do. Thats why we go from distributed to centralized and back and forth and back and forth. HTML apps are one way of doing distributed apps with little amounts coming through the wire. Once the wire gets big and fast enough, then HTML apps will be unnecessary.

Same thing with Web Services. One of the futures they promise is a personal centralized repositiory for an indivudual's music, documents, videos, news. Sooner or later (hopefully later), the advances in digital storage will mean that this is completely unnecearry. Instead of using many devices to connect to your information store (.NET) we'll be able to store all of it in some DNA that we can implant on an ID card or in our bodies, ect. Then, the cycle will repeat :-)

Foruntately, the pattern I notice is that everytime we've gone full circle, we stick the cool stuff from our distributed model together with the cool stuff from our centralized model and now we've got lots of choices, each complementing each other depending on the problem we're solving. Web services will have their place, but like everything else, they're not the end all to be all.