In the 1990’s the term, “browser ubiquity” became a popular means for describing the gains that would be achieved by universally deploying a web browser and leveraging common protocols like HTTP and HTML. Via browser ubiquity, users were able to create a critical mass for communicating human-to-computer information. This led to the wide-scale adoption of the browser and created a new paradigm for web-based communication.

While browser ubiquity targeted the human-to-computer category, interface ubiquity is applied toward the computer-to-computer category. Again, common protocols (like WSDL, SOAP and UDDI) are required and new software systems must be installed to leverage the protocols (see Service Network Participants).

Browser ubiquity was applied toward different domains like business-to-consumer, consumer-to-consumer, business-to-employee, government-to-constituent, etc. In this model, at least one of the parties was a human participant. In the interface ubiquity model it is likely that neither of the participants will be human but rather computers. But again, it is anticipated that common problem domains will surface. The domains that have already surfaced include: application-to-application integration, trading partner integration and SODA (Service Oriented Development of Applications).