The first bit of David Linthicum‘s podcast today covers the SOA 2.0 naming nonsense, calling it “disingenuous” and a “land grab”, and pointing out that it will cause more confusion. Yesterday, I linked to Macehiter Ward-Dutton’s Stop the Madness petition to protest the use of the term SOA 2.0. Since then, Loek Bakker and I have been having a conversation about it.
To quote a comment that I put on Loek’s post, I’m assuming that the two Neils are being a bit tongue-in-cheek with the petition, and are using it more to raise awareness of the silliness of versioning a concept. Regardless, head over there and sign it as a strike against meaningless marketing-enabled terminology worldwide!
Update: I forgot to link to James Governor’s post, which links to several others that share this opinion on SOA 2.0, and on to their links, and so on.
Sandy, I agree that there are more intelligent things to do than versioning a concept. However I have some objections against dismissing concepts just because somebody does not like the term. There has been a lot of bad criticism for Web 2.0, and on my blog I wrote it would be silly to dismiss everything surrounding this controversial term as BS, just because it smells like hype. Now the same goes for SOA 2.0: highly unnecessary term, however it signals that there are many objections to be made against the “old” SOA and everything surrounding it. At least some people are having trouble understanding the true value proposition of SOA. The useless REST vs SOA(P) debate shows that something went wrong in preparing a soft landing for SOA. The story behind SOA 2.0 is an attempt to move away from the mess created by the people that “hijacked” SOA, but I agree with you that probably this will even make things more complicated and create more confusion.
In the end, what all analysts, technology catalysts such as yourself and good consultants like myself should do is separate substance from hype and BS. 😉
— Loek
P.S. And I think blogs are a very good way to do so…
I was going to call out the Web 2.0 term, but it has enough new concepts wrt social networking that I’m giving it a temporary pass even if some people equate it mostly with the technology. The same is not true of SOA 2.0: the concepts are the same, it’s just some different technology.
I’m just waiting for the first of my customers to say “should I buy SOA 1.0, or wait for the 2.0 version to come out?”