Thus, it's entirely possible that $$ saved the Web, rather than purely technical changes.
So, getting to the point, I'm wondering whether folks hereabouts can point me to solid research about the magnitude of this investment? I'd like to back up my argument with some solid economic research into the question, and I'm not really adept at ferreting that sort of thing out from a library, being a humanities type.
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I would begin by querying folks at the following organizations who undoubtedly have members with quick access to this sort of data.
....
Internet Architecture Board
http://www.iab.org/documents/index.html
Internet Society
Internet Engineering Taskforce
Internet Research Task Force
....
And, if you'll indulge an opinion of mine for just a moment...
Like you, I've heard and read this assertion that 'web services' saved the 'Net.
Web Services usually means those things you can do with J2EE as implemented via BEA Weblogic or IBM Websphere to name prominent dev platforms.
Before these products were available, JAVA-heads, led by Sun Micro, declared loudly that the language would change everything and bury Microsoft.
Projects like the JAVA version of a productivity suite (was this from Caldera?) which ran with the swiftness of sap during a robustly cold January in Vermont suggested that "write once, run anywhere" wasn't all that great if the running part was numbingly slow.
Enter J2EE, enter web services. Now we know what JAVA is good for: providing methods for presenting and manipulating new and legacy data via a browser.
So, it seems to me that web services are responsible for saving JAVA more so than for saving the 'Net.
Now, my JAVA-head friends are polishing their ass whooping paddles to take me to school for my temerity.
DRM
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