Amazxon and eBay were early leaders in e-commerce. Now they're early leaders in a new frontier: web services. The New Face of E-Commerce, in the July 27th Internet Week, explains why this matters:

"Here's a measure of how important this open approach has become to eBay: About 40% of the items listed for sale on eBay's U.S. site come in through its API. That means two of five products are loaded onto the site software-to-software, rather than manually posted using a browser-based form. Major retailers are taking advantage of these tools, and software companies are hustling to make their tools fit the model."

In other words, eBay and Amazon are becoming software platforms, with their own developer communities. Even huge software packages like SAP are linking into eBay. That's certainly a zephyr of change in the technology world; but leave it to Bill St. Arnaud of CANARIE to point out the full implications:

"With the new Grid web service standards (WSRF) these concepts can be also extended beyond the retail on-line shopping industry to process control and manufacturing industries as well e.g. oil and gas, pulp and paper, distributed power, environmental industries, etc."

Grid computing may seem esoteric, but SETI@Home is a well-known example that you may have seen for yourself. Other public projects exist, and private eforts are accelerating. Grid computing + Web services are trends to watch... both individually, and for what they can do together.