I just read Tim Bray's entry entitled SOA Talk where he mentions listening to Steve Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jon Udell, Dana Gardner, and Dan Farber talk about SOA via “The Gillmor Gang” at ITConversations. I tried to listen to the radio show a few days ago but had the same problems Tim had. A transcript would definitely be appreciated.

What I found interesting is this excerpt from Tim Bray's blog post

Apparently a recent large-scale survey of professionals revealed that “SOA” has positive buzz and high perceived relevance, while “Web Services” scores very low. Huh?

This is very unsurprising to me. Regular readers of my blog may remember I wrote about the rise of the Service Oriented Architecture fad a few months ago. Based on various conversations with different people involved with XML Web Services and SOA I tend to think my initial observations in that post were accurate. Specifically I wrote

The way I see it the phrase "XML Web Services" already had the baggage of WSDL, SOAP, UDDI, et al so there a new buzzphrase was needed that highlighted the useful aspects of "XML Web Services" but didn't tie people to one implementation of these ideas but also adopted the stance that approaches such as CORBA or REST make sense as well.

Of the three words in the phrase "XML Web Services" the first two are implementation specific and not in a good way. XML is good thing primarily because it is supported by lots of platforms and lots of vendors not because of any inherrent suitability of the technology for a number of the tasks people utilize it for. However in situations where this interop is not really necessary then XML is not really a good idea. In the past, various distributed computing afficionados have tried to get around this by talking up the The InfoSet which was just a nice way of deprecating the notion of usage of the XML text format everywhere being a good thing. The second word in the phrase is similarly inapllicable in the general case. Most of the people interested in XML Web Services are interested in distributed computing which traditionally and currently is more about the intranet than it is about the internet. The need to justify the Web-like nature of XML Web Services when in truth these technologies probably aren't going to be embraced on the Web in a big way seems to have been a sore point of many discussions in distributed computing circles.

Another reason I see for XML Web Services having negative buzz versus SOA is that when many people think of XML Web Services, they think of overhyped technologies that never delivered such as Microsoft's Hailstorm.  On the other hand, SOA is about applying the experiences of 2 decades of building distributed applications to building such applications today and in the future. Of course, there are folks at Microsoft who are wary of being burned by the hype bandwagon and there've already been some moves by some of the thought leadership to distance what Microsoft is doing from the SOA hype. One example of this is the observation that lots of the Indigo folks now talk about 'Service Orientation' instead of 'Service Oriented Architecture'.

Disclaimer: The above comments do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. They are solely my opinion.