The thing about the web is that if you look at it, it has no object models and it has no APIs. It's just protocols all the way down. Some of the protocols are loose and sloppy like HTML, and some of them are extremely rigorous like TCP/IP. But if you look at the stack there's no APIs, there's protocols all the way down. I think that the thing that you take away from that, is that that is the way to build heterogeneous network locations. A few other things that we learned from the web is that simple message exchange patterns are better; I mean HTTP has one message exchange pattern; I send you a message, you send me a message and the conversation is over. And it turns out to have incredibly good characteristics and so on.
-- Tim Bray, explaining objections to WS DeathStar in an interview