Success Quote by John W. Thompson

“Nothing more” is doing the heavy lifting here. John W. Thompson, a businessman who’s spent decades selling and steering enterprise tech, is deliberately puncturing the hype cycle. At various moments, “Web services” have been framed as a revolution: a magic layer that makes systems instantly interoperable, a shortcut around legacy complexity, a buzzword you could staple to any roadmap. Thompson’s line functions as a reality check aimed at executives, buyers, and even engineers tempted to treat the architecture as destiny.

The specific intent is managerial clarity: reduce a slippery term to a customer-facing outcome. Not “SOAP versus REST,” not registries, not service buses - just interaction. That framing is strategic because it re-centers value around usability and integration rather than novelty. Web services aren’t a product by themselves; they’re plumbing that only matters insofar as it enables people (or other systems acting on their behalf) to get something done.

The subtext is a quiet critique of tech metaphysics. By collapsing “Web services” into “a way for users to interact,” Thompson denies the industry its favorite illusion: that naming a pattern creates progress. It’s also a power move from a business lens: if services are merely a means of interaction, then the differentiator shifts to the application, the workflow, the data, the trust layer, and the business model. In the context of enterprise computing - where vendors compete on platforms and standards - this is a reminder that customers don’t buy abstractions. They buy outcomes, and they punish complexity dressed up as innovation.