Simon Fell just announced a SOAP server for Winamp. The interface supports the basic operations: play / pause / stop / prev / next / currentTrack.
Maybe all of the work in the 80s/90s with publish/subscribe and generic object models got one fundemental issue terribly wrong: the substrate used to connect two random programs needs to be both trivial and ubiquitous; OpenDoc surely failed both, and COM/DCOM/CORBA seem to have failed to some degree as well...
