Hi Mike,

>
>2. lack of vision. This, on the other has, does not have an ovbious technological solution. Take a service like the UniversalThread. It would be pretty simple to write a UT Web Service client in VFP and dock it in the VFP toolbar. In fact, I've done this. But what can I actually do with it? Anything interesting? Last I checked there was no way to actually post from a Web Service, which eleminates the possible Use Case of being able to ask support questions directly from the VFP Help menu, and read those replies all in the IDE. How about sharing classes and code? I'd like to be typing a way in a command window, think of a question, have the UT in my IDE, check out the UTFAQ and have snippets of code pasted in to my PRG.
>

That sounds like cool stuff. I agree about the lack of vision though. I think Apple may have tapped into the potential a little. I thought Sherlock looked compelling on the MacWorld keynote. Steve Jobs made a funny remark that while Microsoft is trying to figure out what .Net is, Apple is delivering real web services. They packaged together several services that I thought were appealing: email, ad-free web space, shared calendaring, photo sharing, etc. for $99/year. Some will whine about paying for this stuff, but there is not as much free stuff as there used to be. I'm not saying switch to Mac (I don't own one), but I believe they are showing what can be done. If you create compelling services with good interfaces, people will pay. Of course, Apple doesn't have to worry so much about standards support, but this doesn't matter to the end user.

>So, we have some things to work through. The biggest question I have right now is, by the time we work through these, will Web Services be obsolete? We move back and forth from distributed and centralized computing all too often. Usually with a vengence. I can imagine, some time in the future where we move from the current state of Web Services to an environment where every computer has an operating system whose file system is really a database. So the way I store my Word Documents and manage the Checks I write are exactly the same as how my company stores information in a database about the customers we support. And that accessing the files on your home computer is functionallity identical to accessing the files on the computer you happen to be looking at. This open architecture would basically eleminate all the need for Web Services as we currently know them.
>

I think MS is working on that database file system thing for 2005, Windows "Longhorn" I think, but I may have the codename wrong.