Internal vs. external systems

In a recent comment, Mark responded to something I said:

"Do you need Internet-style absolutely heterogenous systems inside a company, or is a somewhat more constrained environment possible?"

It's certainly possible, but nowadays, isn't the best option usually to assume that your service will end up on the Web/Internet anyhow? As I've been known to say, the Internet is the general case.

I strongly disagree that the Internet is the general case. While Amazon has exposed key pieces of its e-commerce platform via POX and SOAP, it hasn't - and won't - expose key customer data that it has promised to keep private, analysis of customer purchasing behavior that offers it competitive advantage, employee HR records and other internal business administration information, and whole host of other things. Similarly, here at Mindreef, we make a very clear distinction between our public and private systems, and we go way out of our way to make sure that you can't get to the latter from the outside world. This is true in most companies. They expose a tiny percentage of their IT systems on the Internet and they work really hard to keep it that way.