Web services - are you ready for it? Take the quiz at CIO magazine online. Find out where you rank. I scored 80. Of course, we're already grokking them. How about you?

Platform, vendor and language independence - sounds pretty good to those people who are responsible for tying all these systems and companies and technologies together. When Microsoft launched their .NET initiatives a while back, the industry thought it was a lock-in situation - that Microsoft was making a move to own a market and that the effort was doomed to fail. But as it turns out, what the .NET story and other efforts have driven (at least in part - it's not just a Microsoft thing at all) is the continued growth of interoperability - through web services. Walls have been torn down in the process, not built up.

And now we're starting to see the popular landscape (this is not anything new, it's been around for years now) shift more toward a services-oriented model of application development. Some say it's Google taking on Microsoft. Whatever. What really matters (or should matter) to businesses today is participation. Time to get on-board if you're not on this rocket ship already.

(via Adam Gaffin)