Middlemen, however, can provide additional value by adding a ring of additional information around this B2B exchange, because in many cases they provide the only thing automated in the customer's workspace. But we've never asked where our customers are reaching as they use these rich applications. We haven't given people what information they need, and in what context. For example, when building a business model in Excel, I might have access not just to the spreadsheet itself, but also to other models, information, and a community of developers working on the information side of the project. To the user, the different sources of information should be transparent.
Data processing is only a subset of a customer's application requirements.
We're almost to the point, again, where just as Microsoft's Cairo promised a completely object-oriented operating system, we need a consistent operating system for these ubiquitous devices. In Europe, for example, people sit in front of a PC with a T3 connection and still access information from their WAP phone over a 9,600-baud connection just because it's their preferred device. These devices, unfortunately, promise thousands of operating systems in thousands of versions. We, as developers, will have to take this device ubiquity for granted for the first time. Wrestling with legacy mainframes will have been nothing compared to this.