These days, when you think about leaders in Web services, you tend to think about IBM, Microsoft or Sun — or some other tools vendor that is providing interfaces, code and applications servers. But my candidate for the top spot isn’t a vendor of computer software. It does sell a lot of stuff, though, in fact more than most Web sites and with a wide range of products and items. My candidate is Amazon.com.

What does a glorified online bookstore have to do with Web services? Plenty. Amazon has been leading our industry in several fronts, almost since the first book was sold in the summer of 1995. Two recent developments once again emphasized how Amazon is taking steps beyond what many of their competitors are doing: Itís opening up a Web services interface to its back-end systems and allowing customers to use keyword searches to actually view a series of the pages of the books that are for sale.

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