"The Internet is entering its Lego era. Indeed, blocks of interchangeable software components are proliferating on the Web and developers are joining them together to create a potentially infinite array of useful new programs. This new software represents a marked departure from the inflexible, at times unwieldy, programs of the past, which were designed to run on individual computers. As a result, computer industry innovation is rapidly becoming decentralized. In the place of large, intricate and self-contained programs like Microsoft Word, written and maintained by armies of programmers, smaller companies, with just a handful of developers, are now producing pioneering software and Web-based services. These new services can be delivered directly to PC's or even to cellphones.

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"The idea of modular software, where standard components can be easily linked together to build more elaborate systems, first emerged in Europe during the 1960's and spread to Silicon Valley in the 70's. Despite its promise, however, modular software has generally been limited by corporate strategies that have held customers and other programmers hostage to proprietary systems. Those limitations have eased almost overnight, mostly because of the open-source software movement, which promotes making information available to everyone.

"These tools are changing the basic core economics of software development," said Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems and one of the designers of a powerful set of Internet conventions known as Extensible Markup Language, or XML, which make it simple and efficient to exchange digital data over the Internet."