Your point about me focusing too much on the technical weeds is exactly my complaint about articles linking SOA and Enterprise 2.0. Too many people are tighly coupling the concepts of SOA and Enterprise 2.0. In my opinion SOA represents the technical weeds. As a technologist, I am exicited about SOA and will push to use the concepts whenever possible. However I think that tying the success (and hype) of SOA to the success of Enterprise 2.0 actually belittles the promise of Enterprise 2.0. I say this because Enterprise 2.0 represents a new way of interacting with people, which is far greater in promise than the bits and bytes of how we build and deliver applications.

One final point that I will make that represents my opinion of being underwhelmed by SOA: I am sure most people read Dion Hinchcliffe’s blog. He recently wrote (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=74) about trends in 2006, and referenced the stats kept by the Programmable Web. As of the end of December 13, 2006, a not-so-staggering 348 APIs had been registered along with 1350 mashups. While these numbers are respectable, my point is that if you compare these very low numbers to statistics about the last major software revolution (world wide web), the numbers pale in comparison (think of the number of website registered in the 90’s and how fast that grew).