Comment Articles

Web services in poll position

Peter Judge AnchorDesk

Published: 17 Jan 2002 16:29 GMT

Last week I wrote a story about a ZDNet UK poll about Web services. I got more feedback from that story than anything else I have yet done for ZDNet.

It was a surprise. The story was based on a poll of our own readers, a quick snapshot of the opinions of people visiting our site, not a rigorous statistical report. Yet certain people, it seemed, were taking it very seriously indeed.

For one thing: The subject was a serious one. Web services have been promoted as the next great way to build distributed intercommunicating systems using standards, and we wanted to know if you agree. Are you going to implement them and which technology are you going to use to implement them? The established technology, Java, or the new entrant, Microsoft's .Net?

So we asked you in a Quick Poll. We reported the results. Then, as the poll continued, we noticed the results were changing radically. We found evidence that Microsoft employees were making efforts to sway the results, and reported that.

This was all straightforward. Things happen, we use the tools we have to find things out, and then we report on them. It's our job.

The balance of the feedback was positive, so we are probably getting something right, and explaining it reasonably well. But some of the criticism suggests some things could be explained better.