Web Services: Growing Business on the Internet without Chaos

We have all seen the analysts' projections about how business on the Internet will account for trillions of dollars worth of transactions within a very few years. Is this really possible the way we are doing business now, or are we really just using an ad hoc collection of technologies and standards that will soon reach their limits? Although often confused with vendor-specific offerings, "web services" offers us a scalable model that allows a business to tell the world what it does, allows it to find potential suppliers and customers, and then connect with its chosen partners. I'll talk both about what this means for business but also how it is a logical extension of what we have learned about programming large software systems. This is relevant because, one could argue, the web is the largest business programming environment on our planet (and possibly others as well).