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Why can’t the Web work for us, rather than making us work for it? That may not sound like the conventional view of the Web. After all, people talk about how it lets us shop from home in our pajamas, gather information at the click of a mouse, and generally bask in the glow of a revolution in communications. What I see is different. I see how the Web turns me into a data-entry drone, forcing me to enter the same basic information about myself time and time again as I log in at different sites. I resent how much marketing chaff I have to wade through to get to the part of a Web site that interests me. I understand, painfully, how hard it is to get information from the Internet via any device other than my desktop or laptop computer. These problems are not merely personally inconvenient. They damage businesses by pouring epoxy onto our notions of a frictionless economy and smooth supply chains. Just imagine what happens when you take the inefficiencies related to a single Web-based transaction and multiply them by 80 billion, which is the number of components that telecommunications giant Nokia Corp. (www.nokia.com) orders in a single year. Yet the technology exists to allow companies to vanquish these nagging problems and let the Internet take a much more powerful form. The breakthrough comes because of new software standards, with exotic names such as XML, SOAP, and UDDL. In the absence of these standard ways of sharing data, the Internet has basically been a lot of Web sites interacting with a lot of people’s eyeballs. With these standards, computers can now talk directly to other computers in a host of new ways. As a result, computers will be able to do a huge amount of work on our behalf. The overall concept, called Web services, is analogous to the emergence, a decade ago, of e-mail systems that could reach beyond a single company’s walls and connect with anyone, anywhere in the world. Web services will allow the kind of slick interplay among companies, suppliers, and customers that futurists talk about so blithely. Already, Web services have let Mail-Well Inc., a custom printing company (www.mail-well.com), pursue gigantic new revenue streams. Mail-Well had grown to $2.4 billion in annual revenue in just seven years, but it was beginning to be overwhelmed by its own success. As orders poured in electronically, the incompatible data formats used by customers’ order-entry systems, by suppliers, and by the print-shop floor’s computers created havoc. For fear of choking to death, Mail-Well was forced to delay opening additional Web portals, such as a spectacularly popular site that offers printing services to the real-estate industry. Once the company turned to the XML data standard, though, its customer-support problems dissipated. Mail-Well bought a simple, off-the-shelf server appliance that formatted all the different forms of data into XML. The system, which was installed within weeks, sends XML updates to all the customer representatives. As a result, they now have spreadsheets that pull together all the data necessary to track the status of a print job, even including related items that often get bundled with customer orders. Freed from troubleshooting data issues, the reps can take on all the new business they can find. Fujimi America Inc. (www.fujimiam.com) used the new XML data standards to remove a major source of inefficiency in its dealings with Intel Corp. (www.intel.com). As a chemical supplier, Fujimi was required to send a certificate to Intel guaranteeing quality before it could ship any chemicals. Fujimi was too small to afford an expensive electronic-data interchange such as larger suppliers have, so it faxed the certificates. Intel then manually entered them into a database. This system could create problems when Intel needed a shipment quickly; Intel’s data-entry people might have to comb through piles of faxes to find the right certificate. With inexpensive data-transfer software now on the market, though, it took Fujimi just four weeks to arrange for its machines to talk to Intel’s machines. Document-handling times for both Fujimi and Intel have fallen from days to minutes. Errors, which used to be frequent, have fallen to virtually zero. Soon, as a result of these standards, companies will go beyond automating interactions with each other and will make dealings with customers smoother, too. When a reservation is made online, a hotel could easily send a message that would update the customer’s calendar on his personal computer and his personal digital assistant. When the customer pays the bill, the hotel could supply an electronic receipt that could be used to automatically update his expense report. An airline could report flight status to anyone, whether via cellphone, PDA, pager, or computer. Additionally, rental car companies could track flight delays and identify late passengers. Web services will even salve my own complaints about traveling through cyberspace. Once I’ve created secure service links with my preferred vendors, I will no longer have to log in. I won’t have to repeatedly key in information about myself. From my desktop, I’ll be able to get instant notification when an important FedEx package reaches its destination—no more monitoring FedEx Corp.’s Web site (www.fedex.com) and putting up with promotional material. No more one query at a time, either: From an application on my desktop, I will be able to simultaneously track as many inbound and outbound packages as I want. (For the Web-site owner, providing just the information needed to update something such as a stock price—while not sending banner ads or a full, content-bloated Web page—would cut the number of bits transmitted by a factor of 15,000, according to some unofficial monitoring I’ve done.) In other words, the new standards related to Web services are making it possible to compute exactly the way the customer wants to. The interesting thing will be seeing which businesses figure this out first.
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