Bill Gates: Unplugged

"At the semantic level, we actually now have standards. That's been a holy grail for over 20 years. People spent a lot of time futzing around getting the bits to flow between machines and now that we have that, you think, 'Well I can point a browser at any Web site. Why can't I do a query about all the sellers?' The reason you can't is because that's at a higher semantic level than just how to put the stuff on the screen. And it's far more complex. Only Web services give us a foundation for us to do that, so in a sense, a lot of the dreams of the '90s, like true e-commerce, had to wait for this industry standard infrastructure and the tools to be put in place."