I sometimes think that the best job in the world would be strategic thinking. Every time I see a quote from a strategist, it's always five years out and full of promise. You know the ones I mean. It goes something like this: "By 2005 every wristwatch will have a Pentium 7 processor and 2 GB RAM, with voice recognition and holographic screen projection." It seems like nice work, and there's no burden of delivery. It's even better than being the weatherman.

At a time when Web services is in its infancy, I sometimes feel like I have just that job. One of the interesting facets of editorial work is setting an editorial calendar and selecting topics. Doing that for this first year of Web Services Journal has been akin to looking into my crystal ball and peering into the future.

Some things are easy to see - we're looking at a world of Web services deployed with technologies such as SOAP, UDDI, and XML. We'll be talking a great deal about the overall architecture of delivery, focusing on .NET and SunONE, among others.

Other things, though, are a little less clear. For Web services to become widespread, we need compelling business reasons that will drive adoption. There are several possibilities that loom on the horizon. Even though dot-com fever has cooled, the Internet still exists, still functions, and still connects millions of people and thousands of companies. The Internet has irreversibly altered the way companies do business, and progress continues unabated.

As businesses become increasingly dependent upon one another, they will continue to make efforts to tighten their supply chains. They may accomplish this with Web services, linking their business systems and providing real time responsiveness to the smallest of issues.

Peer-to-peer solutions may also drive the adoption of Web services. In a sense, Napster was one of the first peer-to-peer Web services - and it may be a consumer rather than a business focus that truly launches Web services.

Business-to-Consumer is an additional avenue for Web services. The discovery capability of the technology may finally make it possible for intelligent agents to break into the mainstream. Finally, we may be able to have our computers go out on the Web, find vendors who provide the services we're interested in, determine the lowest bidder (or other criteria, such as immediate availability), and conclude a transaction.

It may also be the need to interact with other companies at a process level rather than at a transactional level. Business conditions change frequently - too frequently in some cases for transactions to be fully defined. We might see Web services ride the tide of business process management, providing the infrastructure, or even the structure itself, of collaborative business.

Underlying all of this will be a plethora of technologies. As is typical of the information technology world, there are competing standards and platforms. Which in a way is not all bad. The reality of Web services is that we are pursuing a neutral course in terms of data and data structure, and layering services on top of transformable, machine-independent data. The ability to select a particular platform to provide Web services is an advantage to all - it future-proofs the existing and often enormous investment companies have made in their operational platforms.

Truly, we don't know which direction Web services will come from. In all likelihood it will be a combination of all of those avenues driving the need for standards and processes. It's impossible to say which standard or standards will prevail - Web services exists today, but not nearly in the abundance that they will in the future. But hey, since this is a strategy piece, I'll make my predictions.

By 2005 we'll see a world where personal agents interact with Web services to obtain content, products, and services. Businesses will build competitive advantages using Web services to improve their supply chain management, and will use business process management services, brokered by Web services, to adapt their business to constantly changing conditions.

Like I said, the good thing about being a visionary is the lack of accountability. By 2005, no one will remember my prediction and we'll be concentrating on a world where Web services are endemic. And then I can make my 2010 predictions. Stay tuned for a world of Web services.