I don't mean to minimize the importance of persuasion as a function of enterprise IT systems. When you come right down to it, there are really only four reasons for making IT investments at all: to decide what to do, to document what you did, to persuade someone else to do something, or to create content interesting enough that someone will pay to have access to it. Everything else is mere variation in how we apply emerging technologies toward combinations of these goals.

Too often, though, it seems as if application developers—or perhaps, in most cases, their clients—are valuing images over other forms of data by that faux-proverbial ratio of a-thousand-to-one. It's often the case that a few well-chosen words can have much more information value than an ambiguous image—and that the cost in bandwidth, the footprint on storage, and the difficulty of searching through a collection of image data are much, much more than a thousand times greater than the cost of using words or numbers.

Hardware and bandwidth breakthroughs certainly invite the introduction of imagery into environments where it was previously impractical to deliver it—for example, in remote medical diagnosis, where the image quality of cellular telephones' cameras is now meeting critical and objective standards for serving physicians' needs. There are definitely applications in which it is appropriate to explore additional use of imagery, and it is useful to have new Web services standards available for discovering, securing, and delivering such complex data in the most efficient ways.

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