Software Services: Scientific Challenge or Industrial Hype?

Web-services keep making headlines, not only in technical journals but also in the wider media like The Economist. Is this just a sales plot of the fragile software industry targeted to the companies and organisations that want to operate in the new economy as enabled by the internet and wireless communication? Or is there a new paradigm as far as software development is concerned? Should we, scientists, regard this as a challenge? Or dismiss it as hype? In this paper, we analyse these questions in the context of the notions of complexity that arise in software development and the methods and techniques that can be offered to address them.