Tuesday, June 04, 2002

WSJ.  Confidence in the dollar is extremely low.  Corporate America has done to itself what 9/11 wasn't able to do. >>>The dollar, which remains near 16-month lows against the euro and six-month lows against the yen, is suffering from a crisis in confidence in U.S. equities as doubts mount over the soundness of corporate governance and accounting practices.<<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog] true -- i expected this to show up more dramatically than it did... but it does appear to be showing up. Inverstor's call a timeout for the US while we retool our checks and balances to keep our engine running lean. 10:00:27 AM

Tell me about web services and make it quick. What to tell the CEO about web services. Web services are important to business because they enable systems in different companies to interact with each other, more easily than before. With businesses needing closer cooperation between suppliers and customers, engaging in more joint ventures and short-term marketing alliances, pursuing opportunities in new lines of business, and facing the prospect of more mergers and acquisitions, companies need the capability to link up their systems quickly with other companies. Thus Web services give companies like ours the capability do more business electronically, with more potential business partners, in more and different ways than before, and at reasonable cost. [Scott Loftesness] I think of web services as a low-common denominator integration technology, the quick and dirty alternative, the integration option of last resort (or first resort if you're prototyping :) ). In the enterprise, I've seen interest on two fronts -- one, for talking between business partners, usually in the context of a pre-existing relationship (i.e. not done via directories on the fly). two (far more common), for integration between legacy apps and platforms within the organization, ofter between business units. One interesting use case I saw was where one organization removed a scripted procedural interface to their system and replaced with a SOAP interface -- they felt that the WSDL/Schema gave them a way to define their contract to other divisions by nailing down the allowable actions and the required/optional data in the messages. 7:13:33 AM