Web Services seems to be just another mechanism for decoupling that allows independent change of implementation, and (supposedly) some sort of dynamic lookup of implementation.
You might look at Creating the Computer: Government, Industry, and High Technology by Kenneth Flamm, and also his Targeting the Computer: Government Support and International Competition. However, these precede the "Internet revolution" by a few years.
Well, as it turns out, this is what I've been documenting and studying for the last six years-- because I have to write programming books, that teach engineers how to use the various standard API's that define these web services. Broadly, the point of having "de-coupled," componentized, services is to make it easier to program "distributed applications." The demand for componentized applications that could be deployed on any platform and operating system was more customer-driven than engineering-driven. Engineers didn't mind writing huge, monolithic applications that did not have to bridge heterogenous environments. But, of course, if you wanted to redeploy such applications into a different environment, you'd have to rewrite them. Expensive. So the notion of transparent communications accross the net and of "write once, run anywhere" applications became very important.
Computing, in general, cries out of standards and openness; capitalism depends upon private property, of which "intellectual" property is a part. So the development of computing is always pulled into these completely contradictory directions.
I'm not clear about how much technical background you have and so I don't know what needs to be explained.
Try me at home, at 510 451-3109 if you run into troublesome stuff.
Joanna
