Nobody ever got fired for buying SOA
[Disclaimer: These are my opinions and not a generalization of the industry as a whole, i can only comment on things i read and make comments on things i've seen. I've been a terrible future predictor in the past and will probably still be one in the future (this prediction included :-))]
Some trends even been observing for a while and a post i've read online on Weblogs @ ASP.NET provoked the writing of this post. Since it has been yesterday it already disappeared from the main page (i can't remember to which blog it belonged, doesn't seem i subscribe it either) and google hasn't indexed it yet so i can't credit it.
[Update: This was the post i was refering. Thanks to Julia Lerman for the link]
The small post (2-3 lines (or what least that is what i've retained :-)) wondered if SOA is not being overhyped to a point that will follow hailstorm path.
Although i think hailstorm failed (delayed? will comeback?) due to a number of totally unrelated things:
- Privacy issues (notice the hubbub concerning new Gmail service from google)
- People weren't ready for paying services yet (free is still on a lot of mindsets :-))
- Data location (mainly a issue of trust among other things) people seem to have some strange sense of possession. :-)
- And some other things that i don't wish to address because i don't want to deviate from my topic more than i already have :-)
It is possible that SOA is so overhyped that after a point, people won't touch it with a ten foot pole because they haven't been burned by people who implemented solutions that had nothing to do with SOA but labelled it as such (and billed an amount directly proportional to the hype but with a ROI inversationally proportional).
In this industry (70's and 80's) there was once a popular saying "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" (later replaced with other names, as the industry progressed and power shifts ocurred). Basically it means no decision maker would be pin pointed, later on if a project goes badly. After all he bought from the leader himself so it must have been a good decision. (or preventing from being blamed from not having bought from the market leader if a project goes bad. Classical cover the back scenario). On the book Gorilla Game, Geoffrey Moore later on stated that since the gorilla is the only one who has the lasting play it's the only safe choice (as a small player i tend to disagree but he is the one writing the books. :-)).
I'm starting to think that SOA is starting to suffering from the same problem. Don't get me wrong, i love SOA and i would like to see it become something that puts bread into my table in substancial amounts in the future, because i really believe in the power of this architecture and it's something that (when applied correctly) brings (IMHO) a lot of added value to a client and it's information system. But i'm starting to think that all this overhype, misuse and abuse will do us more harm than good in the long run.
Projects will be approved (and expensive ones), they will be implemented but surely the results will not be as good as when they were sold. This is because as with all hype, there is more substratum than substance. People gobble up some webmethod attribute into a method and they call it SOA, totally disregarding the basic SOA tenets.
This anecdote seems to be the other side of the coin.
Surely such a high coverage of SOA, will allows us geeks to play SOA bingo while attending some meetings (when allowed) but apart from that, no much fun in watching all this silver bullet talk.
I could stay here all day, pondering my keyboard furiously but i couldn't write it as eloquently or as clearly as Rockford Lhotka put it in SOA, dollar signs and trust boundaries. (great soundbite The S in SOA is actually a dollar sign ($OA).) [Found via Ted Neward and subscribed]
[Update: Found this interesting post on Dare Obasanjo blog]