Don't mess with the term "SOA"

Richard Turner warns us about the danger of calling everything SOA.

We ran into this same sort of problem with Web Services.  People were calling their HTML Web sites a Web Service.  That is why Microsoft went the route of referring specifically to XML Web Services.  Of course it was a no win situation because then people started thinking our Web services were propietary since we called them XML Web Services and not just Web services. Ugh!  I think it is safe to say that the community acceptance of the term Web service finally is that XML is implied.  Thus we here at MSDN don't feel compelled to stick "XML" in front of "Web Service" anymore. 

But think of the dangers.  What if the term Web Service was dilluted to mean anything on the Web?  Interoperability would be a joke.  The IT industry wouldn't understand any of the benefits of loose-coupledness or service-orientation, and we would be stuck with people trying to screen-scrape HTML if they wanted to write an application that communicated across the Web.

The same goes for the term "SOA" or, for that matter, "service-orientation."  If people start saying, "Existing technology X is service-orientated," when it is not then we confuse people on what SO is and why it is a good approach to take compared to other technologies.

Just so everyone is clear, DCOM is not service-oriented.

   -Matt