A tale of a prediction gone wrong

This post focuses on yet another incident from my college days. It was the early 2000s, and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)- based services were emerging. When most of the solutions were technology/ programming language specific, integrating multiple solutions was difficult.

With SOAP-based web services integration, programming languages/platform-agnostic communication was possible by using standards such as WSDL, SOAP, etc. XML was the standard format used for the data exchange in these technologies.

This reminded me of the TCP/IP protocol. The Internet could not have been possible without everyone agreeing to TCP/IP protocols and every computer that is part of the Internet understanding the TCP/IP stack. This made me think that XML would be the next thing in the world of technology that would gain everyone's acceptance. XML was text-based format, and hence did not have the problems that are common with platform-dependent binary formats.

In one of my presentations, I discussed the aspects associated with XML and made a bold prediction that XML is going to be the next significant standard in the world that is going to be adopted by every technology. It seems so funny now when I think about the confidence I used to have in my prediction those days.

We then realised that we are embracing complexity by relying on SOAP-based solutions. Instead, HTTP itself is capable of communicating the application states without needing technologies built on top of it. We call this approach REST (Representational State Transfer). Also, JSON format was favoured over XML for its simplicity.

One of the major takeaways from this incident is that while one can make several predictions about the evolution of technology, only one can come true: almost all of our predictions will be wrong. Also, as professionals, it is our responsibility to make the evolution of technology easy instead of making predictions. Alan Kay has summarised the duties of the professionals in evolving the technology very well.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it - Alan Kay