Transformations and the Semantic Web

Not the end The decentralized approach isn't necessarily in conflict with the vision of machines talking to machines and doing useful work for humans. It just arrives there in a different way, with different kinds of bumps in the road.
Evolution, not creation 'Evolving standards' may not sound like the best thing to do when everyone's watching the Internet time clock and competing for market share, but it may well answer the needs of organizations and individuals better than vendor- (or even large customer-) driven processes defining standards.
ISO 9000 doesn't live here There are a number of places where ISO 9000 and its ilk work very well, but there are also fields where XML might be able to help but Dilbert would mock ISO 9000. Those may be the breeding grounds for this kind of development.
Distributed processing continued Some call it chaos, but chaos is known for breeding order as well as order is known for breeding chaos.