Creating Services that Fill a Need

For a Web Service to be successful and make money, you have to create something for which people are willing to pay for. The most visible such family of Web Services today is .NET My Services from Microsoft. Microsoft is hoping that developers will incorporate these services into their own products, allowing Microsoft to handle Internet storage of everything from favorite Web sites and contact information to categorization details. (One of the .NET My Services is called myCategories that allows you to organize more specific items, such as myContacts.) The need they hope to fill is that of a central repository of commonly accessed data. According to the Web site, an individual company can deploy .NET My Services internally for all of its employees. At this point in time, licensing and other issues have not been announced. To stay up to date on any announcements, visit http://www.microsoft.com/myservices/.

What need will your Web Service fulfill? Will your service make it easier for your customers to interact with your business? Maybe you have a large database of information that you want to allow others to use. You might have a specialized system that you host on your own hardware and allow others to access on a rental basis. Regardless of what your idea is, you have to make sure that the service fulfills a need that you believe exists.

A number of services already exist where people pay someone else to maintain data and host servers. An obvious one is Web hosting companies that provide the servers, daily backups, and Internet bandwidth to host a Web site. Another application that people farm out, where all communication is machine to machine is home and business security systems. Companies like ADT have been installing panels in homes that call into a central computer to inform operations staff about potential break-ins and other problems. Look for data or operations that specialize in hosting. Other companies might be interested in renting those capabilities from you and integrating those services into a larger application.

These are examples of where people already make conscious decisions to let someone else handle the hard problems associated with a computer-based system. How do you identify the things you own that someone else might want to rent?

Suppose you have a lot of custom libraries that you use for analysis that might be valuable to others in your industry. Exposing this code as a Web Service may make sense. For example, you may have some sophisticated simulation software. If you simulate the effect of wind on a solid structure, builders of airplanes, and buildings, other items could benefit if you figured out how to expose the application as a Web Service.

Finally, you may simply be a visionary and will know what other people will want to use as a Web Service. If you execute well on the idea and are lucky enough to be right, you may wind up a millionaire.