I smiled today as I read Mark Nottingham's post where he described vendors of WS-* technologies as Vendor-pires. However what I found even more interesting was the following comment by Yaron Goland which states

First of all who says that the vampires are necessarily happy with WS-*? I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out why my group's VP (Brian Arbogast) goes around giving speechs about just using plain HTTP.

Second of all who says even the vampires can talk with each other in any useful way?!?!?! At least three people with text on this webpage know the answer to that question from hard real world experience.

Third, what to do without WS-*? Gosh, I don't know, how about ship useful code? I hear that HTTP stuff is pretty cool. If anyone cares you can peruse a bunch of blog entries on my website (www.goland.org) where I walk through a number of key enterprise scenarios and show that nothing more than HTTP+XML is required.

And yes, I still work for Microsoft. In fact, one of my jobs is to write the best practices for the design of all external interfaces for Windows Live. What you will see is a lot of HTTP, microformats, URL encodings and XML. My instructions are clear, first priority goes to simple HTTP interfaces..

Oh and here is a thought that an unnamed Microsofty gave me. The new shlock movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0417148/) Snakes On A Plane (SOAP). Just a thought.

Yaron Goland is another one of the folks who'll be working on the Windows Live developer platform along with others like Danny Thorpe, Ken Levy and myself (virtually). I've been thinking that there is a big disconnect between the folks who sell the technologies and the folks who use them even within Microsoft. I've been slowly trying to bridge that gap but we definitely still have a long way to go as an industry.