But for all of us to go to the next stage, to get more out of the Internet, the flattening process had to go another notch. We needed two things. We needed programmers to come along and write new applications– new software-that would enable us really to get the maximum from our computers as we worked with these digitized data, words, music, and pictures and shaped them into products. We also needed more magic pipes, more transmissions protocols, that would ensure that everyone's software applications could connect with everyone else's software applications. In short, we had to go from an Internet that just connected people to people, and people to their own applications, to an Internet that could connect any of my software programs to any of your software programs. Only then could we really work together.
Think of it this way: In the beginning, work flow consisted of your sales department taking an order on paper, walking it over to your shipping department, which shipped the product, and then someone from shipping walking over to billing with a piece of paper and instructing them to churn out an invoice to the customer. As a result of the Berlin Wall-Windows-Netscape phases, work flow took a huge leap forward. Now your sales department could electronically take that order, e-mail it to the shipping department within your own company, and then have the shipping department send out the product to the customer and automatically spit out a bill at the same time. The fact that all the departments within your company were seamlessly interoperable and that work could flow between them was a great boost to productivity-but this could happen only if all your company's departments were using the same software and hardware systems. More often than not, back in the 1980s and early 1990s, a company's sales department was running Microsoft and the inventory department was running Novell, and they could not communicate with each other. So work did not flow as easily as it should.
We often forget that the software industry started out like a bad fire department. Imagine a city where every neighborhood had a different interface for connecting the fire hose to the hydrant. Everything was fine as long as your neighborhood fire department could handle your fire. But when a fire became too big, and the fire engines from the next neighborhood had to be called in, they were useless because they could not connect their hoses to your hydrants.
For the world to get flat, all your internal departments-sales, marketing, manufacturing, billing, and inventory-had to become interoperable, no matter what machines or software each of them was running. And for the world to get really flat, all your systems had to be interoperable with all the systems of any other company. That is, your sales department had to be connected to your supplier's inventory department and your supplier's inventory department had to be seamlessly connected to its supplier's supplier, which was a factory in China. That way, when you made a sale, an item was automatically shipped from your supplier's warehouse, and another item was automatically manufactured by your supplier's supplier, and a bill was generated from your billing department. The disparate computer systems and software applications of three distinctly different companies had to be seamlessly interoperable so that work could flow between them.
In the late 1990s, the software industry began to respond to what its consumers wanted. Technology companies, through much backroom wrangling and trial and error, started to forge more common Web-based standards, more integrated digital plumbing and protocols, so that anyone could fit his hose-his software applications-onto anyone else's hydrant.
This was a quiet revolution. Technically, what made it possible was the development of a new data description language, called XML, and its related transport protocol, called SOAP. IBM, Microsoft, and a host of other companies contributed to the development of both XML and SOAP, and both were subsequently ratified and popularized as the Internet standards. XML and SOAP created the technical foundation for software program-to-software program interaction, which was the foundation for Web-enabled work flow. They enabled digitized data, words, music, and photos to be exchanged between diverse software programs so that they could be shaped, designed, manipulated, edited, reedited, stored, published, and transported-without any regard to where people are physically sitting or what computing devices they are connecting through.