Ike,
Here's something to spin around in your head. Yesterday I talked for a couple hours to a friend I hadn't seen in a while. He is a network engineer for Ciena (a company I love to short!) anyway he talked about all the equipment that your favorite companies manufacture. Cisco, Intel, HP etc. and he said that these companies are in for a rude awakening! The 2nd wave of the internet is about to get off the ground, and he said it ain't hardware driven! Bandwith, faster routers, optic switching will be an over kill. As there is this feverish pace by Microsoft, and a slew of others to create a standard for XML. Of course I had to ask "What the hell is XML?" If you don't know, I'll try to convey what I got out of it. It's a language that can be geared industry specific, and also be able to seamlesly mesh, to transfer information between applications, the example he gave was, say you are at a site looking at stock data, and its pages of information, then you deceide you want to see the information sorted differently; that request would be sent back to the server, reprocessed, then transmitted back to you. With XML after the original request all manipulation on data would be handled by your computer, I thought the example a bit lame, but he said that the reduction in bandwidth required to perform request, multiplied by millions of users, is staggering. He wouldn't go into much detail about this, but he did say that most large corporations would end up with 40-50% excess network capacity, once XML begins migrating as the standard, and replacing the bandwith hog HTML.
Microsoft is currently defending it's trade secrets furiously against defectors that have attempted to start software companies based on XML, as they have Non-Competes with MS. |
