UML has its roots in OO and it should decide once and for all if UML is OML or something else, such PML (Power Point Modeling Language), GML (Garbage Modeling Language)...

It would make sense to simplify UML if it had a well defined purpose, but even OO non longer exist. I have argued for a long time that modern software architecture has long gone passed OO principles and POJO-Oriented Programming is just a convenient way to inject behavior within metadata. There is nothing Object Oriented about that.

OO is not well suited to model information either. DDD may artificially represent some aspect of an information model but it can't be used to create efficiently the representation of this information model in different contexts (message exchanges, UI bindings,...).

So, simplifying UML would first require that we understand why people use UML, it would take real courage from the fathers of UML to realize that their initial thoughts, though perfectly respectable and logical, has been overwhelmed by the advances of software engineering. It would take them courage to realize that OO is no longer the prominent programming paradigm, by far and unbeknownst to the vast majority of developers. It would take them courage to actually facilitate the development of architecture independent programming models, that are so critically needed in our industry. But no, I can guaranty you that none of that will happen (why a vendor would promote Architecture Independent Programming Models?). The OMG will make sure that the OO bubble remains as big as it can. I respect the OMG, I think their processes and the quality of their work is very high compared to many other standards but the right thing to do today is not to simplify UML, it is to overhaul UML.

You can be sure that won't happen: this is what Steve Cook , leader of the UML revision task force, explains as an introduction:

 There was a lot of agreement that UML is too complicated and we need to find a way to simplify it for normal people

Of, course, based on the discussion I had with Doug Purdy and Keith Short last spring, the plan will be to absolutely kill the M3 layer, such that we can make sure that Architecture Independent Programming Models will never see the light. With Microsoft driving it, we can expect that Power Point and Visio will become the prevalent UML tools after that effort is complete.

Our industry is about to lose another 20 years of progress, sad. 

MoDisco provides an extensible framework based on EMF to develop tools for modernizing existing software systems.

What a great way to give people jobs and boost the economic recovery. It is so appeasing to see our society make progress in leaps and bounds. This kind of pinnacles give us soothing sense that our generations have contributed immensely to the heritage of humanity. Of course, all this could just be a conspiracy from the French to lock these stores into conservation for hundreds of years as examples of how venal we were in this era, illustrating the subble devious mechanisms of our "economy".

In an unsual move, even Sandy Kemsley agrees (we always have to worry about monetization when Sandy says something):

[Stephen] puts all of this together into a core state machine, with links to an event server for receiving inbound events and a process server for initiating actions based on decisions, blending together an event, decision and process architecture.

She adds:

A good look forward, and some sound recommendations

I wish the traditional application platform vendors would understand what Paul, Stephen and nowadays may others are explaining.

The Rise of State Machines (I prefer "lifecycles", but I understand why people continue to call it State Machine) is inevitable. This is how information systems work. Our good friends, the "computer" scientists spent all their life optimizing "computing" when the core concept of information system construnction is "state". It's sad that we spent the last 40 years on the wrong track. Who knows if 10,20,30 or 40 years ago our industry understood this subblte difference. I know for sure that there are many vendors who have too much to lose to let this concept emerge.

The biggest transformation Cloud Computing will bring to our industry is the emergence of the fittest programming models. That is very, very, very exciting.

Hum...am I talking about starting a No Computing Movement?

About four years ago I sat in a meeting that had finished early. We were chatting away and the subject turned, as it always does, to the lamentable state of IT....Wherever we had invested significant funds to improve and mature our infrastructure we were now spending significantly more and taking longer per-project even for minor changes...that day ... changed my mind about what a good architecture looks like. ... We'd uncovered a major cause of architectural rot and that there were things we could do to work around it, but not what the 'right' answer was.  A bunch of people came to the same conclusions as we did, but did know what to do about it. And they went and built real things to address the problem. These people are the pioneers of the NoSQL Movement and they represent probably the most important change in architectural thought for ten years.... [last but not least] Actually many of the concepts aren't new. 

You guessed it, this paragraph works for anything, SQL, SOA, Web Services, CORBA, EJBs, REST, whatever. This is how our industry supposedly moves forward.

Let's replay the pattern:

1. The way we do things sucks
2. We tried, X,Y and/or Z and it sucks even more
3. Somehow, somewhere, someone has a "ah ah" moment
4. He or she rounds up friends and family and creates a No X, or No Y or No Z movement
5. This nihilist movement is poised to become the most important breakthrough in the industry
6. But no worries... these concepts are not new, you are already familiar with them

For Julian, it is No SQL, for Stefan it is No WS, for some it is No EJBs, for me it is No CRUD & MVC,... we are all nihilists. No need to say that analysts and pundits LOVE this grand creation wheel. An infinite number of arguments can be derived from it, and of course, in the end we realize that nothing can really be annihilated. Some even call for a resurrection, with the expectation of creating a new circle of "innovation" and of course more importantly monetization. 

Julian gives a great business example to illustrate what he is nihiling about. His business problem was that he needs to change its data model from one supplier per order to many per order. He complains:

The ORM in Rails is good, but not perfect. Although it simplifies our code and allows us to change that quickly it hasn't done anything about the data underneath. Even in the simple example above there's quite a bit of data restructuring and migration to do behind the scenes. 

Yes, life sucks. We all wish we had push button technology or even a fancy natural language interface and somehow, automagically our systems of record would adapt to our ever changing mind.

Julian's solution? ... Documents.

Businesses are very used to dealing in documents. They like them because they can be passed around (workflow), annotated (audit trail) and are so flexible that they can cater for two instances of the same document type being treated entirely differently (prototype-based inheritance). If we could develop an alternative architecture that was document-based and not based on relational-tables we might very well have something.

Serendipitously, Julian explains:

We did develop a few good ideas, including what I now see was an inadvertent reinvention of REST 

But of course, Julian. He actually even goes as far as explaining:

I'm a big fan of Domain Driven Design, which, if you remove all the practices and foofaraw, is all about creating highly expressive models, models that stretch from requirements to code without creating an impedance mismatch between the business and the developers.

In the end it's pretty clear that we live in a multi-dimensional space and optimizations in one dimension, even though interesting or even useful, have created this architectural vortex we are in. Yeap, "documents" are such an interesting idea, until you need to report on them or even create UIs that deal easily with variations. Nothing is impossible, yes new reporting engines could be created (Tilion was one of them back in 2000) and some dynamic UI framework can be designed, but what will be the next problem?

The only way to get out of this architectural vortex is to separate programming and operations models from architecture. MOP tackles the former while William El Kaim Cloud OS concept can tackle effectively the latter. The problem is not (or is less) architectural, the problem is about the way we harness software architecture. We don't seem to understand that an information system requires multiple execution environments, there is no way around it, but it does not mean that the programming and operations models have to be fragmented. As a matter of fact, turning off architectural elements to solve programming or operations problems is the worst way possible to make progress.

The article explains that French readers were prompt to report that the car was parked on a "disabled" spot.... After investigation, it appears that both the picture and the disabled permit are legitimate. Eventually, it was not the best idea to park it close to the Apple store.

People at the table doubted that competitors like SAP had anything to do with it, so they didn't like I suggested that was probably the only reason. However, I had no idea of the behind the scene motivations of SAP. This article from the WSJ paints a truly sad reality:

On September 15, less than two weeks after the Commission launched its extended probe, SAP CEO Leo Apotheker wrote a letter to Oracle's Larry Ellison. The letter, which we have seen and hasn't previously been reported on, reads in full: "As you know, we have significant concerns about Oracle's proposed takeover of Sun. We renew our invitation to meet to attempt to resolve our concerns and other open issues between our companies. Please let us know if and when you would like to meet."

he timing of the letter suggests that Mr. Apotheker either believed, or wanted Oracle to believe, that he could smooth the merger review if he so desired. Nothing came of the offer, and the Commission now seems poised to block the deal.

I have never been found of the EU rulings, but if the allegations of the WSJ were true, this would be a new low for the EU and our industry in general.

The future is Metamodel Oriented Programming.

The 248 companies that have reported third-quarter results so far saw their cash holdings go up by a percentage point sequentially to 11.1 percent of assets, the paper said.

What's really funny is that some are horrified at the emergence of Socialism in the US, when in reality, it is often the same people who are responsible for forcing the government to run the economy. Cash is the enemy of wealth -and capitalism, maybe one day they'll figure it out.

I am not sure it has anything to do with Ballmer being a techy or not. I think it only has to do with Ballmer critically looking at how he uses his own products. Howard Hughes used to fly airplanes. Steve Jobs demos his new product features. When Ballmer looks at an AirBook and tells you that's a piece of crap because "it doesn't even have a DVD player", you understand how disconnected he is from his products and his markets. I bet the only thing he focuses on all day is how much money is going into the bank. Microsoft's customers had to wait until Office 2007 to be able to do a decent cut & paste between PowerPoint and Word in lest than 5 key strokes. Nobody can convince me that Microsoft's senior management is using its products.

Ballmer never understood that in his decade "content" was the name of the game. Software for software's sake is loosing its value at a rapid rate.

What's funny though is how people use REST when building APIs. Rackspace, not the smallest Cloud provider, published that API:

GET /v1/<account>?format=json HTTP/1.1
Host: cdn.clouddrive.com
X-Auth-Token: a6e3359b-3749-440a-9292-0bdcb0e33617

Yes, versioning of the API (V1), not the file instance, in all the URIs, yes, the content type as a parameter.

It is my opinion that there is no versioning strategy possible for REST since it couples access with identity, but adding a version token in the URI is the worst strategy you can adopt. I mean ... for a file system, come on, who could ever design such a thing.

Joe McKendrick is bullish about "Next-Gen" SOA. The infamous pump & dump analyst who recommended a "Sell, Sell, Sell" on SOA earlier this year is now talking about the "resurrection" of SOA (is that a "buy, buy, buy"?). She moronically declared:

"We have an opportunity at this point to resurrect SOA. We need a different approach, one based on architectural principles."

But, Anne, didn't you just said the opposite less than 12 months ago? That Services were the focus?

Yesterday, Randy Heffner was even more redemptive as he presented "Fixing the worst SOA mistakes". Except for #7 which I whole heartedly disagree with, they are certainly worth a read. Yet, this second chance at SOA looks pretty much like a "deja-vu". There is fluff all over it. You can't teach old monkeys new tricks. I won't even talk about the SOA Manifesto, I expressed several times how I felt about it.

My take is that this world of analysts and pundits has become nonsensical. It has no direction, it only knows how to create (vicious) circles, not even bubbles. SOA is no match for them, so they make a living off it by destroying its value rather than reaching out to its beauty.

You want some proof? This is what Anne says:

All the discussions I hear about cloud are the same discussions we had about cloud four to five years ago

You nailed it, with your hammer that is. Circles, Circles, Circles. I can't wait to read their contribution to Cloud Computing.

We need a commonsensical approach to SOA (and the Cloud). We need to understand the programming model behind it (and how MOP can be used to surface it), the role of governance, versioning and loose-couling (Service Containers)... that's where we need to start. No more fluff. If you don't get it, just move on.

I am long on SOA: its concepts are timeless, its programming model is a huge step forward compared to what we have been doing for so long. So there is no "new" SOA or SOA+1, there is simply SOA, but for sure we need a new generation of analysts. A generation that actually understands what they are talking about, instead of the puppeteers we currently have.

He recently published an analysis on where and how people talked about events at the BPM09 conference.

In summary, it seems the event perspective has still to evolve in business analysis and modeling in the mainstream (as represented by this conference, in any case). But there were some good ideas here.

If he and William Vambenepe could connect we could even see how events relate to Operations and Management and ultimately Cloud Computing. We would start seeing how wrong of an approach REST is to Cloud Computing.

This is how they present the manifesto:

The SOA manifesto is the bible of the SOA tought leader community.

Even the former Soviet Union never dared to look that stupid and make this kind of claim.

Since then some teams at IBM have been working on the topic, for instance Ksenia Wahler. If you can stomach the math behind it, here it is. However, I don't think BELs are part of SOMA yet. That's a shame, it means that not everybody understands SOA at IBM, by far.

BELs are not new, again, I am not sure John invented the concept. You can find traces of BELs in this EDOC presentation. EDOC was a great standard developed at the OMG in the mid 90s. They were just missing a true orchestration language to create a complete service oriented process centric model driven programming model, but they too understood the power of BELs.

Of course BELs are at the core of Praxeme, a modern SOA focused Enterprise Architecture Framework (yes, most of their materials are available in English).

Business Entity Lifecycles are a game changer for SOA, this is the kind of things we should be discussing in 2009, but how can you expect that any dignitaries of the SOA manifesto would even start to comprehend that? Just leave the fluff behind, and understand that there is a programming model associated to SOA, at the core of this programming model are the BELs.

Orchestration programming languages are a great approximation for BELs (BPEL, WF,...). But you can really use any programming model you want.

And yes, Stefan did sign it. Nor surprising afterall that he is one of the highest ranking official of this politburo.

Needless to say that I will not sign this kind of crap. SOA needs more formalism and less vapor.

MomentumSI has created a discussion forum about the SOA Manifesto. I highly encourage you to voice your opinion, whether you agree with me or not, of course.

The highlights include a 14% decline compared to the same quarter last year and 18% decline in profit.

But... on a $13B revenue Microsoft brought home a $3.57B, a mere 27.6% of pure profit. Again nothing wrong with profits, profits are good, the only problem is that this money is rarely, possibly never, reinvested in innovation. It trickles down to the US Government who has been put in charge of "creating jobs", by deciding how this money is spent (and we know how that goes).

By contrast, Amazon brought home a whopping $199 million this quarter. But what Amazon does? It innovates: Cloud, Kindle, world class ecommerce platform...

The real game changer would be if the 20 largest corporations in America would stop making profits and reinvest them, themselves, in R&D.

We delivered a solid quarter in a difficult environment... We never laid off anyone and we have no plan to lay off anyone.

Investors demand cash, lots of it, I am not sure why, because the more cash those companies have at hand the least they will innovate. Just coorelate Microsoft's cash peak to its ability to innovate in the last 5 years. Close to no successful innovation. In the mean time, this "cash" must be invested in specific financial products and often end up in the hands of the government who borrows the "cash" to keep the economy running, in effect running the economy in the most socialistic way possible.

In the early 80s, the French government was running directly or indirectly 50% or so of the economy, in effect naming the CEOs who ran national or semi-public companies, including car manufacturers like Renault or the French Telecom company.

I don't think the US government really decided to become a Socialist Republic, but surely our most successful entrepreneurs decided for us that it was time to create the Socialist Republic of America and leave the government running the economy by borrowing the "left overs" of capitalism. Who wants to waste his precious time innovating with $335B? That's way too much trouble.

If Microsoft is the next Sun, who is the next Microsoft? Apple? Certainly has more cash than Google.

In fiscal year 2009, which ended in June, the Windows group accounted for $14.7 billion in sales, 28 percent of Microsoft's total sales of $58 billion. It produced an operating profit of $10.9 billion, or about half the total. Although the group responsible for Windows accounts for only about 6,000 of the company's 90,000 employees, their successes or shortcomings cast a wide shadow on the rest of Microsoft, people at the company say.

You no longer have to read between the lines to see that even the Times (as you can imagine, a long time Microsoft's cheerleader) sees the writing on the wall.

When Microsoft has to suffer deeply and totally unfair competition from companies like Apple. This is what happens:

in this period of growth, market share of Microsoft's operating systems for phones, Windows Mobile, fell 28.7 percent. Apple, with its popular iPhone, saw its share grow 627 percent.

The article makes a very important remark and then extends its analysis to Cloud computing:

The loss extends beyond market share to mind share of developers...In the smartphone industry, Microsoft has already lost mobile developers in droves to Apple's iPhone, [and] ... The software developers who used to build programs to run in Windows also are building software for the cloud.

And SalesForce.com to add (I bet they know a thing or two about this):

the operating system as something that shapes my experience, that defines what I will actually be able to do with my device, is really irrelevant

Ballmer has of course a razor sharp strategy to counter all these unfair attacks:

Ballmer likes to say Microsoft's philosophy is about "long term, long term, long term." "We don't go home," he said in a speech earlier this year. "We just keep coming and coming and coming. Tenacious, tenacious, tenacious, tenacious."

[As an example]...Ballmer looks at Bing as a success story.

Which translates in French as "Notre Strategie est immobile, immobile, immobile". Steve, do us a favor, for the sake of Seattle and the company that made you so rich, just go home, go home, go home, your term has been too long, too long, too long. Your tenacity is only commensurate to your innability, innability, innability to achieve anything for this company. You have transformed Microsoft in a fat duck, ready to be slaughtered. You have no clue, you are playing way outside your league. This is now becoming too embarrasing.

To be fair it is important to note that Microsoft would not have the monopoly of stupid senior executives, if this were to be true. Tim Bray pointed out this article which talks about the people that were arrested in the insider trading case this week:

[they include] Robert Moffat, senior vice president and general manager of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group...Moffat had climbed the IBM ladder to the point where he was a prime candidate to succeed Palmisano as CEO

With great power comes great irresponsibility.

The Seattle-Bellevue-Everett metro area had the nation's highest delinquency rate for construction and land loans in the second quarter: 32.7 percent, four times the rate of a year earlier, according to Foresight Analytics, an Oakland, Calif.-based research firm. Tacoma, at 28.9 percent delinquent, was fourth highest.

They have been talking for a while about the commercial real-estate time bomb, then the credit card one. It looks to me that 2009 was just a small pause in the financial crisis.

I also found this presentation this morning. It is certainly worth a read as it explains the type of ressession that has been triggered by the collapse of the housing market and now the commercial market. The analysis is based on the Japanese real-estate bubble. It is hard to believe today that Mr. Greenspan had no idea of what he was doing, unless he really had no idea of what he was doing, in any case, his legacy is very clear. The presentation also made me understand more clear what Buffet was saying about deleveraging.

I am not sure after all these months that "mark to market" is such a good idea. The "mark to market" makes sense when there is a market. This accounting rule makes sense in general and protects investors from fraudulent asset values, but there is no doubt that the rule itself killed the "market" it was supposed to bind to. Who can believe that forcing everyone to sell assets at the same time to clean up their balance sheet is a good idea? Sometime you wonder what people are thinking.

That also raises the question about what is the US government doing about its energy policy. This report might be an explanation for the lack of decisions in that space. It is always difficult to predict the future or how the Spanish example will translate to the US, even decide whether the report is actually accurate.

The report concludes that, under the rationale that higher energy costs destroy jobs:

Each “green” megawatt installed destroys 5.28 jobs on average elsewhere in the economy: 8.99 by photovoltaics, 4.27 by wind energy, 5.05 by mini-hydro.

So I guess we'll all be unemployed when Oil will reach $200/baril...

My "English" is probably as translatable as the one from a native speaker, but the translator takes some liberty like tranlating SOA by the equivalent in French of "The SOA Architecture". Not sure where the Architecture word came from.

Barclays PLC's Barclays Global Investors now urges employers to automatically direct 8% of workers' pay into 401(k) savings and build from there. T. Rowe Price Group Inc. in the past year has seen a sharp increase in plans moving all participants into target-date retirement funds -- even if those participants previously selected their own investments. Prudential Financial Inc. on Monday plans to announce a sweeping 401(k) package that, among other things, encourages employers to prohibit workers from borrowing against their retirement savings.

As you can guess, that's not really to sharpen your invesments skills:

Automatically putting a big chunk of workers' pay in stock-heavy, relatively high-fee funds is "a form of financial malpractice," says Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor.

Who's (ir)responsible? Our good friend W:

Pension legislation passed in 2006 ignited the 401(k) automation trend, encouraging employers to automatically enroll workers. Employers jumped on board but generally directed only 2% or 3% of workers' pay towards the plan.

That had, of course, nothing to do with the events that happened in the summer 2007 and until the fall of 2008.

In the nearer term, Microsoft will soon follow a trail blazed by rival Apple Inc. (AAPL) by opening its first store. Asked during Friday's luncheon why this is the right time for such a move, Ballmer said Microsoft's board of directors feels "yesterday was the right time."

Ballmer detailed its world class strategy to kill Apple (I am sure Apple is already running for cover with such a massive and unfair attack):

"We'll open a couple stores, try to improve, open a couple more stores," Ballmer said. "Hopefully over time that leads to success."

Phillip (and Stefan) show this picture and all they can find wrong with SOA is that they can't use OO, they can't model their solution with a collection of classes and generate a service interface (duh?). And what they complain about? the WSDL file is "too large" and guess what... OO types coming from the generated WSDL are not as interoperable as they expected (duh?). Have you heard of something as WSDL-first? do you even understand a thing about model-driven engineering? (hint java2wsdl is not MDE, i.e. MDE is not TDE otherwise we would have called it Transformation-Driven-Engineering)

What's the solution? Atom feeds. Yes, no more code generation, just put everything in a feed and voila. Phillip goes on to explain how he built the solution. You'll appreciate how empty REST is. I can safely predict that nobody will ever be able to build a full scale enterprise information system (such as ERP) in a 100% RESTful way.

When I think of how much BS Stefan et al have laid over our industry based on such a flawed view of SOA, I just want to throw up. I can't help to think about all these SOA projects destabilized by so much boloney. The CORBA guys, included Bill Burke or Steve Vinoski never understood Service Orientation, not a thing. Their mind is anchored for ever in OO and DO (Look ma, there is no naming service so it has to be RPC...). There is nothing about extensibility, versioning, bi-directional interfaces, asynchrony, orchestration and assemblies they can understand. Not that the SOA-RM, RA or SoaML crew understands anything either. What a loss.

This loss is that much dramatic that REST has invaded the Cloud. RESTful APIs will hamper the legitimate growth of the Cloud. How can our genius RESTafarian friends ever believe that such a stateful, asynchronous, event driven world could be a good fit for REST? 

Phillip has the integrity to make a difference between RESTful integration as opposed to RESTful application (knowing well that RESTful applications are just a pipe dream). But, what have you gained? nothing, absolutely nothing. You have diverted scores of people in a rat hole making them believe that CRUD waz the new Cheese, contributing further to make IT as inefficient as it can possibly be. Even the Cloud - such a great idea - you successfully CRUDed it up.

Well done guys ! You can be proud of your scam.

The (other) REST is a fraud.

Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger's latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device - such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos - that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.

Can this company do anything right?

there's some new work going on in defining a SOA Manifesto. Along with Steve Ross-Talbot the working group consists of people from IBM, Oracle, [Microsoft], Red Hat and others.

As you may tell, I am very excited about this initiative, not. This is the best definition of Service Orientation they can come up with:

A design paradigm comprised of a set of principles that shape software programs into units of service-oriented logic in support of attaining a pre-defined target state represented by the goals of service-oriented computing.

Anne Thomas Mannes, herself, is even part of this universe wide, Nobel quality, effort to finally define the principles, intentions and ambitions of SOA. I must be dreaming, April Fools day is now every day. What's next? Stefan Tilkov signing it? I am glad they reference SOA-RM and RA, that way it's easy to know what's going to come out of this moronic work.

I am actually extremely surprised that Duane Nickull was not part of dignitaries of this new SOA politburo. As a side note, I start thinking that there has been a major downside for the world in the death of the Soviet Union. We had, then, a clear model of what not to do, how not to behave, how to govern... 20 years later, their is no amount of ridicule that people will spare in their quest to control the world. Then, propaganda was off limits, then stupid zealous control organizations and stalinian -self proclaimed- expertise was laught at. Aren't we -the Western world- quickly becoming the model not to follow?

Breaking News: Truth be told, Anne Thomas Mannes to present a talk, sorry, a Keynote on the "The Reincarnation of SOA"

the untimely death of SOA has proved fruitful [Yeah, the world thanks you for your courageous effort Anne]. It was a wake-up call to the industry [Yeah ! look ma, we now have the SOA Politburo in action]. It made us realize the error of our ways [and we'll never do that again]. The SOA of the past decade has been too focused on silly technology debates and products...[really?] It's good that the old SOA died [Soooo good, but did it really die? (hint, read the definition above)]. It makes room for a new and improved SOA [I bet the Burton group has published tons of research to explain what the "new" SOA is -please see the definition above it could save you some money] that might just deliver on the original promise [Yeah !! but of course...]. This reincarnated SOA [(sic)] is focused on architecture, principles, and practices rather than technology and products [as defined by a bunch of people that never put their hands, let alone their head, in a SOA project].

S.O.S...Thomas Erl is going to rewrite his entire book collection...S.O.S...

Clearly, this event is a plot to eclipse the launch of Windows -7 and I have heard in my neighborhood that most people are already considering repurposing their Windows -7 Launch Party into a SOA Manifesto Launch Party. Nobody would want to pass on this world changing event.

Having lived this from the inside at WaMu I can appriciate the accuracy. I was also happy to see Marcy Paktur quoted at length in the movie. She is one courageous woman and we need tons like her.

Kaptur, now in her 14th term, is the senior-most woman in the House of Representatives; she’s been elected to 12 of those terms with more than 68 percent of the vote.

Joseph Wurzelbacher, John McCain’s “Joe the Plumber,” has threatened to run against her in 2010, but she doesn’t feel vulnerable. [I am sure she is scared by this dude]

But Kaptur knows her colleagues respect her, even when she is kicking up a fuss. “I think they see me…the words I’ve seen are: feisty, strong, dogged, determined, indefatigable.” She pauses. “What’s the other word? It’s one of these things like, ‘when she sinks her teeth into it she doesn’t let go.’”

The question is how can Tim Geithner survive this movie and the latest claims of Rahm Emanuel running the treasury for him? I have always been puzzled by Obama's choice. I guess I am not the only one.

Larry Kudlow got hammered for his comment on the relationship between the wars and the good performance of the stock market in the 2004-2007 era. Michael also explained that companies like Walmart, Citibank, ATT,... were taking life insurance policies on their employees to increase their profits. They are called Dead Peasant Life Insurance policies.

Wal-Mart chose to ignore Texas law when it took some 350,000 dead peasant policies on employees, including Texas employees, without telling them. The arrogance of Wal-Mart in purchasing these policies in defiance of Texas law is almost beyond belief. The ghoulishness of this practice speaks to the utter disregard - indeed contempt - that Wal-Mart holds for its "associates". Executives enriching themselves on the death of their employees. How low can one sink?

Michael does seem to be a bit tired of this though, so I am not sure when his next movie will come up.

It's a shame that none of my neighbors is going to send me an invitation, I could have done a pretty good Peter Sellers act. I am wondering if I should crash one of these parties.

What's your favorite Windows 7 "activity"?...

If you can't see the embedded YouTube video above, here is a link.

According to PC Pro's report, Ballmer said the company has "pumped in some new talent. This will not happen again."

An example of "new" talent is Lili Cheng:

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, has shuffled the organization of several advanced research teams into a new "future social experiences" group called Fuse Labs.

The group will be led by Lili Cheng, head of Microsoft Research's Creative Systems group. Earlier she led the Windows user experience team when it produced Vista, and worked at Apple before joining Microsoft in 1995.

In a typical Microsoft spill, they comment:

The Fuse lab "will bring more coherence and capability to those advanced development projects where they're already actively collaborating with product groups to help them succeed with 'leapfrog' efforts,"

Microsoft has done so much "leap frogging" these days that they might actually stumble upon SAP's toes. They have acquired such a leaping momentum that they now see IBM going in reverse, an effect predicted by the Theory of General Irrelevancy. I actually can't wait to see the Apple ad on the "leap frog" theme...

Not sure in which Galaxy Monsieur Ballmer lives these days, but a blunder of this magnitude, I would probably argue that he is (ir)responsible enough to put his job on the line. It echos well, Bill Gates' interpretation of the significance of the Web in 1995.

How much market share Windows Mobile is going to gain? Can it do better than Bing? I'll bet $1 that it can't...

The sad part is that the Apple recipe is now well known, and works all the time.

This article made me think of an analogy.

baby boomers, [are] controlling $10 trillion in assets

Baby boomers will move the industry's main client goal from one from accumulation -- investing in assets that create the most value over time -- to one of "decumulation,"

"The questions won't be, 'How did I do against the S&P 500?'" he said. "It's, 'Can I meet these liabilities?'"

If you have seen the movie Ice Age, you probably know what I am talking about, though you might not know that it actually happened here in our backyard.

As companies and individuals alike keep their investment "liquid" rather than productive, the very economy that set the value of these "liquidities" is melting, possibly vaporizing (not just in the Clouds).

Baby boomers, he said, are increasingly spooked by the turbulent markets of the past year, and concerned with ensuring their funds last through retirements that could last 20 years or more.

If you want to get wealthy in the next 10 years, just stop what you are doing and sell investment products that meet these requirements...without ending in jail that is. In France, this Ponzi scheme is run by the government. We have a very good retirement system, so far, even though, just as any Ponzi scheme when the number of payers underweights the number of payees, it stops functioning. Unlike a normal Ponzi scheme, the government then raise retirement taxes to compensate. Ultimately the French government will also have to adjust the amount they pay because it will become unsustainable.

I actually know a far better Ponzi scheme, it's called "the economy", one that actually works, and has worked for centuries, it's called "Invest in (true) Innovation". That Ponzi scheme is responsible for the $10T of wealth they got. We all well know what making these $10T liquid will mean to society.

• TechCrunch says, "It still sucks."
• Gizmodo says, "There's no excuse for this."
• Engadget calls it "very much a nip-tuck job -- just as every Windows Mobile version in recent memory has been."
• Chief Executive Steve Ballmer has acknowledged that Microsoft screwed up with the development of Windows Mobile.

With great power comes great irresponsibility... indeed Steve, there is no excuse for what you are doing across the board. How many Windows have you broken lately?

You can keep track of some of my work here, and check this white paper: CFO Requirements for Cloud Computing.

IT spending, estimated at $1.4 trillion in 2009, is projected to rise $1.7 trillion in 2013.
• IT employment should increase by 5.8 million jobs by the end of 2013, compared to the current base of 35.6 million. That growth would be three times the rate of general employment growth worldwide. The area with the fastest predicted growth is central and eastern Europe.
• Microsoft-related jobs, such as IT professionals who maintain Microsoft software and people who work at hardware and software companies that build off Microsoft products, made up 42 percent of IT employment in 2009.
• For every dollar Microsoft made in sales in 2009, the partner companies make $8.70. Overall, those partner companies are expected to invest $180 billion in local economies in 2009.
• Microsoft estimates cloud computing, the migration from on-site software to software accessed via the Internet, will create $800 billion in net new sales dollars between now and 2013.

The $1/$8.70 ratio is a very tempting bounty for Microsoft to go after when revenue declines.

So I was reading an article this morning in the Seattle times: Stimulus-funded research up to $300 million in state. The article provides some details about which research is funded.

It does matter where the money goes, but I am no longer in the loop for commenting on that. What I found more important is the amount: $300 M. Lots of people would say, that's very high. When I was at Penn State in early 90s, they had just raised, with private donations, $250 M for a new research park. So the amount, is actually not that high. If you try to guess how much the research stimulus was handed out at the scale of the US and assuming that Washington is just an average state (which is probably not true), you get a mere $15 B, for the US. I know this is additional money, not total, but this is puny, this is so puny that the article suggests that they are hiring "lab assistants" to help here and there. I will also let you compare these $15B to the $335 B the 20 richest American companies have in their coffins.

The worst effect of the divorce between research and corporate America that started in the late 80s is the creation of two independent worlds with little to do with each other and increasingly rely on the government to fund research. France had already reached this ultimate state of evolution in the 80s. It took another 10-15 years to reach in the US. The real (long lasting) stimulus for the US would have been to bring these two worlds back together. I did not see much evidence of that. The article speaks more of a windfall that contributes to the local life support system rather than being focused, coherent and synergistic. I am no longer sure it is well funded either.

As I mentioned before, the problem is even deeper than that, it would sure make a lasting impact to have these two worlds communicate, it would be just as equally important to find ways to expand the horizon of Corporate America. This is what Steve Jobs was already saying about Microsoft in 2006:

Here's one of the most widely quoted remarks from Apple CEO Steve Jobs at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference today: "You know, our friends up north spend over $5 billion a year on R&D and yet these days all they seem to do is try to copy Google and Apple. I guess it's a good example of how money isn't everything."

I argue that pretty much all the R&D money in this country is now targeted at the research which is perceived to give the highest margin and that is truly unsustainable from an employment perspective.

We live in a post Keynesian world, the question is no longer about wages and labor. The question is how can capitalism sustain employment when the technoloy cycle is now biased towards job destruction since productivity gains are not compensated by R&D investments. Smart, Comprehensive and Coherent R&D is the solution. (To paraphrase the President) I would say, unfortunately the government can't put a brain in each CEO's head, but as a society we certainly can.

I.B.M.’s footprint is more narrow today than it was when I started. I am not sure that has been to the long-term benefit of their shareholders.”

It is true that Monsieur Ballmer knows a lot about shareholder value and he can freely comment on other's company performance. He is also on the verge of sending Microsoft's stock to a tail spin, so why not comment on other's lack of success like IBM, with a lot more room to grow with a P/E less than 13.

Steve explains that he invested at a loss for years, until he got some presence on the Gaming business. The XBox is such a great example, since the WII came out in late 2006, it has been ahead of the XBox consistently, and it still is in 2009:

IBM's logic is these were low-margin businesses. But Microsoft has a different worldview: It will happily lose money or break even just to get into a market it sees as core. If it sticks with the plan long enough, it wins -- like it did with the Xbox.

But that's the way Monsieur Ballmer leads, from behind. Search, SOA, MSN, Live... are all great example on how to lead from behind. It is kind of unfortunate that he dropped out of his MBA just after the Business 101 class where they were teaching how successful companies in the 70s were "Doing More with Less".

Bob Muglia who saved the Microsoft server division over the last decade commented on IBM's Cloud Computing strategy. In a traditional Microsoft play targeted to reassure all its (unfortunate) customers:

“I don’t think I.B.M. is keeping up,” Mr. Muglia said.

You think that Microsoft does keep up? how, where? You mean IBM doesn't announce its grand plans 2 years ahead of time and only delivers a trickle after 3 years?

Steve, the world has changed. You don't seem to get a bit of it. If IBM is in reverse, and Microsoft is "winning", I am not sure which direction you are heading? With great power comes great irresponsibility.

A very important battle lies ahead between OS, Virtualization and Middleware technologies. Rod calls it an "implementation detail", but you should not be fooled by the significance of this battle:

A.B.: So whether this lays the foundation for an OS-less future – that remains to be seen?

R.J.: As I said, that to me is an implementation detail. There are certainly benefits to having the application -- the middleware layer-- able to interact with the virtualization layer. There are a bunch of benefits there that frankly don't require the operating system to have as big a role.

The reason why I see CaaS in the future of the Cloud is because the (internal or external) Cloud is relying on three properties to drive economies of scale: elasticity, turnkey and upgradeability. When you ask customer to build their own stack on top of EC2 or RackSpace, you don't get much elasticity, you don't really get much turnkey and for upgreadability, you are on your own.

I don't think that a company smaller than Google or IBM can really pull a decent PaaS (i.e. an Application Container) that people can trust to be around for more than two rounds of VC financing, unless it is something like Heroku which offers, a standard Ruby platform. I don't think this is the right model either: if you look at the reality in the enterprise today, the monolithic architecture model has failed because it can't deal well enough with the composite nature of Enterprise Solutions. In the Enterprise today, you have a bunch of poorly integrated containers, gravitating around monolithic architectures a la JEE or Spring (Ruby is no different really, just good old MVC, served in an even more monolithic architecture). The needs of the enterprise are a lot more complex that slapping a couple of forms together on top of a table. I would tend to think that specialized containers and coordinators, (Data Containers, MDM containers, Rules containers, BPEL containers, User task containers, B2B Containers, IAM containers ... transaction coordinators, event coordinators) which can rapidly be assembled in a programming model as being where the Cloud will go. I am sure the Rod Johnsons of the world are going to work hard at convincing you that the same model that failed in the enterprise can fail just as well in the Cloud, but you should know better, monolithic architectures are the problem, composite programming models are the solution.

That being said, I agree with Rod there are tremendous benefits in having the virtualization layer and the containers communicate, and the OS becomes somewhat irrelevant in a container driven world (an OS make no longer sense as a "local", bloated, general purpose hardware virtualization layer). The Cloud will bypass traditional operating systems and promote the development of specialized containers, we just disagree on what the container(s) will look like.

The VM is a stopgap. Virtual containers will evolve to look less and less like hardware abstractions, and more and more like service delivery abstractions.

The post is definitely worth a read. Container-as-a-Service is going to emerge. We are back to the Kiva and Tanga days. That begs the question why is JBoss wasting its time on REST-*? If I were RedHat I would jump on the opportunity of creating a CaaS world.

If you can't come up with any idea about what to do with your cash, you return it to investors buying back shares, or you charge your customers less, or you build better products, the kinds that don't crash and don't get hacked on a daily basis. No, the last thing you want to do is to overpay for silly startups.

$335 b is 3,35 M man years of high paying jobs. If you count the indirect jobs created by 3,35 M more people working in the economy, you get the picture.

How much innovation are we passing on simply because these companies are "too big to re-invest their profit"?

Our society doesn't need more wealth, we need more jobs. We need CEOs that are more Cs than Es. We need CEOs with a brain not a wallet.

After years of economic expansion fueled by unrealistic rates of consumption and unsustainable levels of private debt, the global economy has reset at a lower baseline level of activity.

What I find interesting is when one of the wealthiest man in the world does not include the word "profit", "wealth" or "executive compensation" in his analysis of the crisis. Whether it is about Microsoft or the world economy, you have absolutely nothing to do with it, Google, consumers... are responsible, you have done nothing wrong.

The reason for the current economic crisis, I said it and will say it again, is not exessive debt or consumption. The former is just the symptom of the inability of the market to identify the right prices for goods (this is why inflation was invented), the later is just environmentally, geopolitically and generationally wrong. The reason for this crisis is that the people that capture capital don't want to create jobs with it and when they indeed create jobs, there is an excessive (and unrealistic) competition between these jobs that all aim at creating the next social hot spot or search engine.

The reason Madoff was allowed to happened, is because there was a "market" to capture: people that made money wanted to live off of it (retire they say), comfortably without the minor inconvenience of having to work for it. Madoff made their dream come true. When capital does escape this golden retirement community and is not used to purchase big toys, it is systematically and massively invested in competing ideas, when an idea or market matures, the job losses increase drastically and most of the capital has been destroyed. The economic cycle is destroyed. The contract by which our societies lived for centuries, rewarding entrepreneurs with more capital so that they create other successful ventures, is being violated. That is the essence of this crisis, everything else is a symptom.

I am a capitalist, I don't think there is a better system than free enterprise. The problem is that there is no longer a fair "enterprise" system, just clueless fat cats like Steve who drive millions of people towards unemployment with their greedy lack of imagination.

The new efficiency, Steve, would be to lower the unrealistic levels of wealth, and return the capital to a much larger pool of entrepreneurs (small enough to fail, and yes small enough to not make Microsoft blink) because the kind of wealth you enjoy has created the "innefficiencies" the rest of us pay for. There is no need to do more with less, these "efficiencies" are the problem, not the solution. They are just designed to create more wealth and less jobs, to transform our economy from a vibrant service economy to a servant economy. Our society doesn't need more wealth, we need more jobs.

The irony, Monsieur Ballmer, is that your intimate beliefs make up the very mechanic that is grinding Microsoft to the ground.

It just isn't realistic, he says, to build new businesses from scratch to big profits (the kind that make a company the size of Microsoft blink) in five years or so. Ten years is a more appropriate horizon for new ideas: "You would be hard pressed to name a start-up company that generated an interesting amount of profit in five years relative to 20 billion. Even the most successful. Google in its first five years, Facebook in its five years."

Yeap, they'll never tackle an opportunity until it is big, and then it's too late. Steve, maybe your job is to identify or create these big opportunities 5 or 10 years ahead?

The interview continues and Steve reveals:

Ballmer also specifically highlighted seven businesses that he hopes to dramatically build and/or expand over the next few years: PC innovation, Communication/Productivity Tools, Phones, TV, Search, Enterprise Infrastructure and Servers.

Steve explains:

We can drive [the PC market]. It's going to come from innovation in the tools and technologies both at home and at work to help people communicate, collaborate, to be productive.

Yeap, you read correctly "PC innovation" (the ReadyBoost memory stick is just one of the many), "Productivity" tools (such as Explorer), "phones" (dial phone that is), "TV" (does Steve has young kids or grand kids? do your kids watch "TV" anymore?), "Search" (Shovel and pans provided), "Enterprise Infrastructure" (the kinds that System Center can monitor...). Steve, I am sure that Google is panicking and running for cover now. Apple is already scaling down their iPhone factories. Amazon, Savvis, RackSpace... have started to turn off their Cloud (a.k.a the Dark Cloud).

Nothing about "content" and "data". I am not sure which developer is going to write an "app" on a platform does not manage any kind of digital content. Ah sorry, Microsoft has the Pattern and Practices team. They do produce a lot of content, using their world renowned "Flex Scope / Fix Time" methodology.

So where does Microsoft invest?

"And you know, the biggest investment area for us is in communications collaboration and productivity. That would be the single biggest investment area for us."

Don't miss that quote either:

In the OS business, it’s generally advisable to get it right and stay right

Steve continued his media tour, here is what he is talking about:

The New Efficiency: With Less, Do More

He got it all wrong, at Microsoft, with More they do manage successfully to achieve a lot Less.

I won't comment further, that's too sad.

Steve you are chromed and there is clearly nothing -you- can do about it. The question today is, with such a compelling Shovel & Pan Strategy, which quarter Microsoft will turn Red? I'll bet a dollar that it will be Q3 2011 (Fiscal Q1 2012).

• Opportunity to use code without making any modification is very rare. There is always some architectural variation between different product line / project.
• Effort required to modify an existing piece of code is much higher.
• If the change required is more than 20% then it may be easier to rewrite the code.
• To write a piece of code which can readily be reused requires significantly more effort – factor of 3 is a reasonable estimate.
• Therefore, to derive benefit the code needs to get used at least 4 to 5 times – so large number of product lines with identical technology is basic necessity for reuse.

I would just say two things:

1) If you don't understand how versioning is intimately related to reuse, just look at the services you consume in your everyday life. How often are you notified that a service changed? how offen are you impacted when a service changed? If you don't understand anything about Forward versioning, start here. Reuse is not about reusing what has been written, reuse is about being able to modify what has been written without impacting whoever is currently using that code. Once you'll understand that, everything will be different.

2) Reuse IS-NOT an option. Look around in the enterprise, every single business object, in every single industry: PO, Invoice, Payment, Customer, Account, Product..., every single BO in every single industry has a lifecycle, this lifecycle is independent of the processes in which the BO, a.k.a resource, participates. Not reusing a BO lifecycle is the absolute black hole for IT. This is why duplicated business logic ends up in different places and everything is hard to change and integrate. Not reusing BO lifecycles has vast implications in terms of cost, compliance, security...

At the end of the day there are technologies and a programming model that help with reuse. This is not true of any technology or any programming model. The technologies and programming models that Computer "Scientists" have pushed down the throat of IT for decades are all MVC based (even the way RESTafarians use REST is MVC based), that is the problem, not the solution.

I am not sure if they are talking about how RESTful their email solution is or if "Send" is a verb, polymorphic CRUD or simply CRUD but they sure fight tooth and nails over that tiny piece of business:

In an interview, Microsoft executive Ron Markezich contended that Google's cloud model is still something of an experiment for business customers. Google lacks Microsoft's long experience with companies in highly regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals and financial services...

and he added:

...he said, where security and the smooth flow of data are paramount.

I have been using gmail since 2004. I never lost an email they are still all there, never had to upgrade once, reinstall anything. It may have been down a couple of times in five years. But if you count as down time, the time my hard disk crashed, my computer had to be sent to repair, since most of my emails were "unavailable", or if you count how may times I had to reinstall office, that surely is a lot more time than all the gmail outages combined. A couple of weeks ago I upgraded my wife's computer to Windows 7 -I did buy a new hard disk to decrease my chances of the drive failing-, but I had to reinstall everything, including her IE8 favorites. Who thinks that's the future?

The key to the cloud -and Service Orientation- is central management, including central upgradeability. This is where the business case is. This is where the win-win is, Cloud vendors can make big money is they get it right, and customers can save a bundle if they get rid of this problem.

When a Microsoft exec talks about: "security and the smooth flow of data are paramount" you gotta laugh. Microsoft can't succeed if it does not change its culture. Creating little scares here and there, while reassuring itself constantly, one white paper at a time, with its boat load of cheezy courtisans, is the best way to be gmailed, iphoned, or chromed (sorry I like verbs :-). The time is now, not in two years, not in five.

Getting your arms around all the new features in Windows 7 in preparation for delivering it to your users in a seamless fashion can be a bit daunting. But TechNet Magazine just published Windows 7: The 10 Things You Must Do First to help you prioritize and focus your learning curve.

If someone thinks that people are going to put up with that today or tomorrow or any day thereafter, he or she is seriously mistaken. Most IT departments today have pared down windows XP to become a "desktop application container" (a service they provide and over which they have complete control) simply because Cloud-based applications are not fully ready yet. Except for pampered Microsoft developers and architects who still believe that they need all these bells and whistles to keep busy all day by configuring them, the world would move in a heart beat away from this 1980 insanity. After all Bill Gates may proven right, "all you'll ever need is 640kb of RAM". I am wondering if Google is squishing the envelope to meet that requirement.

The sad part is that Microsoft doesn't even get it. My advice to Enterprise Architects who want to push Cloud projects in their origanization is simply show this article to your favorite CIO and explain to him what a Cloud-based world look like, let him make the conclusion.

Both REST and WS have their place in real life implementations. The issue should be not which one is better, but rather how they can coexist and when is one more appropriate. The other important thing is to make sure that comparisons are based on merits, not beliefs, no matter how strong they are. There are many useful standards and patterns created by WS* and the issue is whether it makes sense to start over or to see how these patterns can be applied to REST.

Dilip Krishnan, another InfoQ editor, and RESTafarian at large, not surprisingly responded:

Can we finally agree that the word "service" is as, if not more important, then "Web"

What does this even mean? important for what and for who?

I say not surprisingly because RESTafarians have no clear position on "service", they just say REST is the right way to build a Service Oriented Architecture. Yet, REST has no concept of "service" anywhere, just resources and their shiny uniform interface, links and bookmarks. Indeed there are no services in REST. Just read the thesis.

But RESTafarians can't care less, if they don't understand or can't explain something, the solution must be in REST somewhere and they look for it, one hack at a time. It is interesting to see how the mind works, it makes you wonder how come mankind has made any amount of progress, ever since we set foot on this planet, and what progress could we have made if we didn't get stuck in the mode of "the solution must be in this book/thesis/theory somehow, I just have to find it". Well the reality is that the solution is often, if not always, outside the box. Just ask Newton, Einstein and the many less known scientists. In computer "science" we have a very small, actually, we don't even have a box, we just have a square: one axis is Turing-complete and the other one is OO, and everything a developer can be given to do his or her job has to fit on that square.  You would surely fall off a cliff if you dared go outside.

But I digress, let's go back to "services". Even Bill, in this REST-* proposal is talking about creating a RESTful interface to non RESTful services. That certainly begs the question, how can a service be non RESTful since REST is all about SOA and replaces in its entirety WS-*.

Ganesh, in all his wisdom, has become a RESTafarian. It is interesting so see someone that understands SOA becoming a RESTafarians, at least you can have a much deeper discussion. He came up with the concept of REST as being Polymorphic CRUD:

IT folk in the enterprise understand both polymorphism and CRUD, so the combined term should make sense. I want to drive home the point that a verb itself is neither coarse- nor fine-grained, it's how each resource interprets it. Fine-grained resources will interpret the REST verbs as CRUD operations. But more coarse-grained resources can interpret the verbs as any arbitrary business operation.

I find also find interesting his use of the word polymorphism, because for me REST is just a better CORBA, i.e. object oriented but it is not service oriented. There is no better post that explains how small the square we are left to play with that Pete Lacey's post in 2006.

They want transactions, and reliability, [bidirectional interfaces, assemblies] and asynchronous messaging, and orchestration, and everything else.

So, Boris committed heresy (defined as proposing some unorthodox change to an established system of belief, especially a religion, that conflicts with the previously established opinion of scholars of that belief such as canon). He dared say that we should focus on Service not just the Web. Unfortunately, Dilip, Ganesh, Bill and so many others, I would like to repeat that there is no evidence today of any application being built in a RESTful way. There are APIs to CRUD data here and there, but the day you'll show me an ERP system built in a RESTful way, we'll talk again.

For me a Service is a software agent which :

• performs a well defined unit of work, invoked by expressing intent, with minimal or no knowledge of the context in which this intent is expressed
• is readily accessible by an arbitrary number of other software agents implemented in arbitrary technologies
• can change the way it performs its unit of work or specify its intent without necessarily breaking the software agents that consume
• the resources involved in the performance of the unit of work, i.e. a service, may participate in more than one service

This is what happens in life every day. We consume countless services by simply expressing intent (e.g. call someone), these services can scale without impacting me  (a wireless carrier can add a subscriber without me noticing), and these services can change again without impacting me either (a wireless carrier can add a "favorite list of callers" without me noticing). An airplane can be involved in performing several services simultaneously (transporting people, parcels and letters).

Service orientation is about creating solutions from this type of software agents (instead of tier-ing and integrating) to achieve the same benefits that we realize in a service oriented society. Service orientation is way out of the square.  It's not that hard, but it definitely requires some unorthodox change to an established system of belief. The irony is that the RESTafarians, including Roy, are representatives of this square based system of belief. They want no progress to be made whatsoever. On the surface, REST could be easily mistaken for a Service Oriented technology. After all it supports 2) well, and has some aspect of 3) taken care of (It doesn't break anything because there is nothing to break). But that's the problem, there is nothing to break, there is no intent in REST, there is a million RPC-like conventions, mostly at the CRUD level. When Ganesh says that you just have to POST something to /applications, and that replaces submitApplication, where is the intent expressed? is POST an intent? can this application participate in different "services"? No, it is not an intent, because you have to file it yourself in the appropriate hierarchy /applications. This is the tight coupling SOA has worked so hard at trying to remove. Service orientation is about expressing an intent and have no particular reason to know what happens next.

The CORBA guys see all this as the promised land, they just pushed the problem of brittle interfaces to developers. Interfaces are the problem, just tell people they don't exist anymore, they have been CRUDed away. All you do in REST is "encode" all your application semantics. They can expand without breaking, but they can't change. REST is CRUD and CRUD is a tight a coupling as you can possibly imagine.

So yes, Dilip, Service is almost as important as the "Web".

Can't wait to see Duane jumping to the RESTcue...better, the BPMN 2.0 crew could also move in Bill's latest BPM "spec" (spectacle that is). While you are at it don't forget to bring Sandy Kemsley and Bruce Silver with you.

Bill, I can see clearly a REST-ML effort missing in your plans. I bet the SoaML crew can't wait to get started.

Google is now cloud computing. Everybody's cloud computing. All it is, is a computer attached to a network. What are you talking about?"

Obviously he never installed one of his product on a server, let alone asked for provisioning a server to deliver some mission critical stuff, or waited weeks on getting access to a shared test environment. But from afar, yes Cloud Computing is just a computer attached to a network...

What may start today as a bundle of a hypervisor, an OS and an app server may become a somewhat monolithic “PaaS engine” over time as the components are more tightly integrated. That “engine” may have memory isolation mechanisms that look a lot like a hypervisor.

For me the PaaS and possibly the IaaS level will quickly evolve to become CaaS (Containers-as-a-Service). There is no reason you should build AMIs yourself or use a monolithic PaaS. These two models are a thing of the past. All you need is a series of loosely coupled containers on which you deploy your business logic and data.

Another clue that Microsoft has simply no clue about the digital era is this interesting collage that features the e-book universe. What Microsoft does not understand is that the industry has reached its 3rd stage: the digital asset age. First it was hardware, then software, today it is all about digital assets. Who cares about software or hardware today? Revenue is increasingly tied to "content" (search, music, video, ebooks, digitized books...). Where is Microsoft in the race to control the delivery of digital content? Even NetFlix got it.

It is likely that in a couple of years the desktop will look completely different from what we see today as applications, data, files... evaporate to the cloud.

I have a Vista laptop and I won't go through the trouble or the expense of upgrading it, Win7 is just as "featured". It will be intersting to watch how Microsoft's revenue and profit decay over the next 2 years as it continues to deliver a bunch of live services unable to generate any revenue from it. Microsoft's business model is based on a corny view of the Software industry and this is unlike to change.

• Search (Bling Bling is abysmal)
• Cloud Computing (After years of hard work, I am glad they could actually ship a couple of services)
• Zune (Music to Apple's ears)
• Windows Mobile (looks more like Windows Immobile to me)
• SOA (not even funny there)
• MDE (they stopped following)
• Databases (long ways to go)
• On demand CRM (by a large margin)
• System Center (:-))
• Online Office (Anyone is ready to guess Office 2010 Market share?)
• XBox (Wii Oui Oui)
• Visual Studio (Totally Eclipsed)
• ...

The question is, is there something they are not a mere follower? Is there a single thing where they don't follow, sometimes well behind.

The sad part is that OS X is not really superior to Windows in any ways and the machines they sell are way inferior to the PCs you can buy.

Not sure what Microsoft's board is doing, but it looks like to me they are asleep at the wheel.

In effect, Bill has rest-arted his working group, but this is no "art" yet.

The idea that the community would welcome such a pack of marketing morons as the standards-bearers of REST is simply ridiculous. Just close the stupid site down.

I must admit that Bill is probably the worst marketer on the planet. How could someone think that calling for REST-* would rally the RESTafarians? This sounds more like an April Fools Joke than a serious industry community driven initiative.

Roy made a statement that I found really interesting:

It even manages to one-up the previous all-time-idiocy of IBM when they renamed their CORBA toolkit "Web Services" in a deliberate attempt to confuse customers into thinking they had something to do with the Web.

For me REST is the better CORBA. This is what Bill, Steve and Stefan see. When you think about it, it has:

• A Global naming service, accessible from anywhere, including a simple browser, by anyone (even my mum can do it)
• An unbreakable interface, CRUD does wonders, no versioning needed
• Coarse grained interactions by default
• Free cache for everyone
• Scalable (Web Server based) Activation Model
• Getters can be added at will without impacting existing clients
• Simple Query Language
• Object Collections
• No proprietary broker, just pure interoperability
• ...

Which CORBA nostalgic would say no to that? If only they had thought of that 10 years earlier? They could have invented ... the Web.

Of course, OTS is missing and a bit of asynch stuff would be nice. Bill, you should try calling it CORBA++, I am sure the RESTafarian would show their appreciation.

Bill sees SOAP (as a Simple Object Access Protocol) and he is thinking how shitty SOAP is in relation to CORBA. He has no clue that SOAP and WSDL were invented by accident to counter ebXML. It had to look enough like ebXML to be able to kill it, that's when Service Orientation was born as an alternative to Distributed Objects to build distruted systems.

In the end, all these people don't understand a thing about SOA, they all think they were already building service oriented systems, way back when, with a bunch of Distributed Objects or a couple of URL syntaxes. I am not sure even Roy understands that versioning does not work in REST and that coupling resource access with resource naming is a terrible thing to do. Not to mention the association resources / network authority. Of course you could fairly easily create a Service Oriented REST, but Roy would dismiss it as non-RESTful. The architecture of the Web is (rightfully) focused on "distributed resources". Unfortunately this does not work for building distributed information systems, they rely on this annoying business logic layer that CORBA anchored to the "business object" themselves and that REST completely ignores. As my dear RESTafarian friends serendipidously define their interface one URL at a time, they are inexorably creating a trap that will make their system just as brittle and inflexible as in the CORBA days. In the end, SO is not DO, SO is a major advance of information system architecture.

some pieces have been deleted, such as the Workflow part of .NET Services.

I think Microsoft should just give up on Workflow, Orchestration and BPM. They simply don't get the space and can't architect any kind of engine properly. Either they are serious about it, or they are not. There is simply no in between. The problem though is that Microsoft is leaving a major fault in their platform as they have now become anemic in the SOA, BPM and MDE spaces. I am sure in 5 years, people will look back and wonder they could have ever let that happen.

But enough bashing, I actually like (the remaining) Azure Services: the Service Bus (??), the Access Control Service and the SQL Service.

I worked with both the Service Bus and the Access Control Service last spring an felt that these were really useful services. I am not sure they make up a programming model though, as it was originally envisioned. If you remove the compute infrastructure that will compete with AWS / EC2, you don't get a sense that Microsoft is offering yet a viable alternative for developers to start moving to the Cloud. Maybe SOA, BPM and MDE could have helped a bit in enabling that platform, but what do I know?

Microsoft Product Development engine is vastly broken, it looks like it is solely based on a handful of individuals who decide everything, come up with "romantic pictures" of what they (the handful) think the rest of the market needs and then what ever they finally ship several years later hits reality (or lack there of). Just compare Dave Chappell's paper, with what Oslo was thought to be just a year ago, in September 2008. Ultimately, bringing products to market relies on three pilars: consumer needs, innovation and positioning the competition. You can't ignore consumer needs, you can't build on the status quo and you must position the competition (or else you'll be positioned). Most of the time, Microsoft ignores all three, they don't care about customer needs, they innovate romantically and they don't position their competitors, they content themselves with "responding to" the competition's every move.

A former SAP colleague (I'll keep the name private) told me this summer that "you are the only BPM expert not part of the BPMN 2.0 effort, all the BPEL crew came back, even Frank Layman". I am actually proud to not being part of BPMN 2.0. This is yet something that will make us loose another 5 years in the BPM space, I said it and say it again, the "standards professionals" don't know a thing about (executable) BPM. BPEL, BPML, and now BPMN 2.0 have been and will continue to be a fiasco for years to come. (BPEL is a service implementation programming language). Of course Intalio had set the bar really low when they proclaimed themselves experts in that space, back in 2000, we never recovered from that. Everybody and their brother got a free ticket to move in that space after that. Thank you Assaf and Ismael.

Then new "experts" came about like Bruce Silver and Sandy Kemsley. They come with their petty beliefs and remained closed to every discussion: "I blog therefore I am ... right". Sandy's last post is quite symptomatic of what's wrong in BPM:

He mentioned my post yesterday about the process model comprehension tutorial, and agrees with my assessment that the vendors have a huge amount to learn from academic research. I’m beginning to think that my true calling is as an evangelist bringing the word of new and useful academic BPM research to the BPM vendor community, although I have no idea how to monetize that.

But Sandy, BPM is not about monetizing your petty work. Far too many people are just in this game to "monetize", after 10 years, you would expect a bit of contrition. Sandy have you considered monetizing on the topic of "BPM is failing"? Dave Chappell and Anne Thomas Manes seem to be quite successful at that with SOA. But in the end, why should anyone care about Sandy Kemlsey's retirement account? The day people like you, Assaf, Ismael or Frank Layman will leave this space we will probably make progress. As long as people like you will be in there to "monetize", we'll stay where we are: nowhere.

Sandy continues:

There must be a way to have funding flow from BPM vendors to BPM researchers without having a vendor try to control the speed and direction of the research, and without even having a specific researcher tied to a specific vendor. Is there a place for a virtual institute of BPM research spanning the many great BPM research institutions, funded by a consortium of vendors, with all having access to the end results? I’m thinking that for less than the cost of having a booth at a Gartner conference, a BPM vendor could contribute significantly to BPM research and reap the rewards.

Dream on Sandy... in the mean time, the rest of us will painfully keep undoing all the crap that "BPM experts" are pushing down the throat of our industry.

I have created this diagram to classify executable artifacts (interpreted or compiled):

The Anemic - Cogent axis could have just been called Declarative - Imperative. It refers to whether an artifact contains "implementation" elements. An example of implementation element is a method in an Object Oriented Class.

The Monadic - Polyadic axis simply reflects the number of concepts that make up the structure of the artifact. OO languages typically have one (major) concept: a class, so they are monadic. DSLs like HTML or SCA have several. For instance SCA has: Service, Component, Composite, Domain, Assembly, Wire, Event,...

HTML is interesting because it is probably the most successful DSL on earth. Lots of people are surprised when I call HTML a DSL. I am not sure I am wrong in doing so. Yet, HTML without Java Script (i.e. an anemic HTML) would be quite a bit less useful. I am not sure the Web would be what it is today without the cogency that JavaScript brings to HTML.

SCA is also interesting because it shows how you can augment all sorts of general purpose language with a DSL: SCA + Java + BPEL starts looking a lot like a Polyadic Cogent programming model. SCA alone though is completely anemic.

This figure calls for a missing category of languages: Polyadic Cogent programming languages. So that bears two questions:

What does a Polyadic Cogent Programming Language Look like?

First, it is polyadic, so pick your favorite (anemic) DSL, here is one with 3 concepts (the more the merier):

Now add some implementation elements to your DSL, just like in OO, a class has a method:

You can of course choose the multiplicity of the implementation element (0,1 or more). A (SOA) Service is interesting because it can have 0 or 1 implementation, depending of whether the Service Implementation is based on a BPEL orchestration or if each operation is implemented individually. Yet, the implementation elements (BPEL or otherwise) are all completely separate from the Service Definition (WSDL). If it is a good thing to have a separate contract definition, it also hides completely the programming model behind SOA, and that's bad. It has lead to all kinds of interpretations and frankly poor implementations, frustrations and clueless analysts talking about the death of SOA.

So at the metamodel level (M2), you just add an Implementation element, but what do write it at the metadata level (M1)?

First you need some processing instructions and basic types. There are two type here: your favorite Turing complete set and an orchestrated set. We should probably combine them both and add events to the mix and have just one standard processing set which could be personalized with your favorite syntax.

The second type of instructions is related to the lifecycle of the elements in DSL: A, B, C. When you say:

A a = new A();

you are simply starting the lifecycle of an instance. Similarly, a Class in an OO runtime has a simple lifecycle: Loaded, Unloaded. A service, in a service container has a couple more states: Loaded -> Started -> Stopped -> Unloaded. Please note that some of the states and transitions may be implicit (e.g. delete() or gc() ).

So just define the lifecycle of each of the elements of the DSL, assign a catchy name for each transition between states and voila, you have your Polyadic - Cogent programming language.

I don't know why the DSL people hate code (i.e. implementation elements), I don't know why the GPL people keep adding annotations or stitching code behind your DSL. These approaches simply don't make any sense.

Nothing is simpler and cleaner. You have complete control over what the language can do, you can even add constraints about which transition a particular implementation element is allowed to call. I can create very robust Polyadic Cogent languages in a couple of days using tools like xtext from openArchitectureWare.

What are these languages good for?

Well if you see the number of annotations floating around these days, Polyadic Cogent Languages should be able to clean up this in no time. At the end of the day an annotation is a just a DSL element and people want to use the syntax of their favorite language to add some implementation element to that particular DSL element. The problem with this approach is that we put a class wrapper around this DSL concept and we let developers loose do whatever they want with the class. This approach is wrong: we are introducing vast amounts of inefficiencies with that, for absolutely no gain at all. SCA's annotations in Java are a perfect example of this problem. Don't get me wrong I really like SCA, but wrapping services (with bi-directional interfaces), wires, composites and what not behind Java Classes is introducing levels of complexities that can easily explain why SCA is not used more. The more polyadic your DSL will be the messier it will be to use annotations.

The same thing is true of code behind (not to mention annotated code behind). Code behind is a bit more aligned with MOP as it is based on events (occurrence of a state), but there are no clear separation between the code associated to each metadata element (like a class - method relationship). The code is generally behind a metadata set and generally exhibits poor reusability and factoring.

Annotations and Code Behind approaches are introducing two dire side effects:

1) there is no clean separation between the metamodel level and the underlying container of the business logic (expressed solely from Metadata and Implementation elements)

2) they prevent the metamodel to span multiple tiers of the architecture

I cannot emphasize enough how bad this coupling between metamodel / container is. Architecture has been widely successful over the last 15-20 years. We have been able to create sophisticated distributed systems that bring tremendous value to their users. No question about that. The problem though has been stitching all these tiers together with lots of boiler plate code, often hand coded, always hard to change.

Today there is a great need to create architecture independent programming models:

 This is exactly what a Polyadic-Cogent Programming Language can, spanning n-tiers, from data to presentation.

Too many companies are stuck today with what they built over the last 10 years. The containers are going out of support and yet they can't change them because they wrote all the business logic within the containers, using their APIs.

In a Cloud world, it is even more critical to be able to create architecture independent programming models.

Service addresses are fundamental to reuse: They provide a way for clients to uniquely identify and connect to application logic.

This is what hard core RESTafarians (and CORBA nostalgists) like Bill Burke, Steve Vinoski and Stefan Tilkov simply don't get. Now matter how you look at it, REST couples access and naming and that makes no sense at all. REST is as close to distributed objects as it can be -resetting the clock by 20 years-, without some of the drawbacks (unbreakable uniform interface, global naming service...). Eventually these people don't understand the difference between a distributed object and a service. Yes some objects can be reused too, no question about it, but services offer a far superior and general model for reuse. No matter how long you stare at REST, you ain't gonna find any service there.

The key to service reuse though is to decouple access to an object from the object itself. A thing that CORBA or JEE never quite got.

Another gem in the book, some people are finally expressing:

Ignore, for the time being, the concept of business processes. If you were going to design a language from scratch that was designed for use with asynchronous web services, there is a good chance you would design something very similar to BPEL. [...] BPEL fits very well into the world of SCA. A BPEL process definition can be used as the implementation of an SCA component. The BPEL partner links become services and references (more on this later), and the interfaces of those services and references are specified using the WSDL port types that make up the BPEL partner link types. SCA's conversational interfaces provide what BPEL refers to as engine-managed correlation, which removes the need for developers to specify correlating information explicitly.

It only took 7 years to get there...

Of course, it now bears the question, how do you get orchestration in REST? ah.. I forgot, REST is synchronous. No need for orchestration. But hey, you can always CRUD asynchronous behavior. I am sincerely wondering how Tim Bray and Bill Burke will crack this nut when they'll want to orchestrate some Cloud elements...

I was more encouraged by his proposal to make it illegal to "not carry a basic health insurance". It happens that, no matter how you look at the problem, health care is an insurance business. I know that George Bush has created "Health Savings Accounts" to bring the "power" of the stock market into solving health care, but saving to pay for you own care, simply doesn't and will never make any sense. Just try to save to insure yourself when it comes to Auto and Home. Even a neighborhood of a 1000 families can't do it, so why a single person could do it?

There are fundamental differences between ordering a sandwich, or a coffee and picking your options and going about getting health care:

• There are actually no "options", everyone should be cared for and treated the same way for the same illness
• As a "customer", health insurance businesses are and will always be encouraged to get rid of some customers, just like car and auto insurance, but unlike a restaurant
• Everyone must carry insurance, otherwise the system cannot work. I would bet that the main reason some people cannot afford health insurance is because a lot of the young and healthy don't carry an insurance.
• There are lots of way to avoid health care cost altogether, via preventive care for instance and programs that continuously evaluate the effectiveness of approaches and medecines
• Providers can charge you the price they want, you need care and you are rarely in the position to "shop around" to apply proper market mechanisms

Health care is not a market. It is really and only about creating a pool of resources that gives the sense that every individual can tap indefinitely. It is not and will never be about creating little or even personal pools of resources that people can tap for a limited number of things.

It is clear to me that no private, market driven, system can fulfill this essential (and existential) mission. This is why so many (Republicans) are opposed to creating a kernel of public health insurance, because that's the only model that works, can work, will ever work and they don't want you to know that. Because President Obama is still focusing to much on value and not enough on values, he will not be the last one having to tackle this issue, by a large margin.

• We ship what we want
• When we want
• We don't care about what customers need, we just pretend to by changing what we ship for every CTP
• And ... if Google doesn't have a similar product, we eventually kill it

This story sounds all too familiar, Olso has joined the long list of embarrassing "products". After all, this is only about MDE, right? Why would Microsoft care about MDE when it has code-behind-some-of-the-most-wonderful-XML-markup ? Why would their customers want to have anything to do with MDE?

The fundamental focal point of “Oslo” has always been the notion of (meta)data stored within SQL Server or another database. If you look at the Repository, it has always been “just a SQL Server database” containing application metadata. Likewise, “M” and “Quadrant” having their roots in making this particular database easier to use.

With this in mind, we made a decision to merge the Data Programmability team (EDM, EF, Astoria, XML, ADO.NET, and tools/designers) and the “Oslo” team (“Quadrant”, Repository, “M”) together.

I can see today Microsoft focusing (again) on a programming stack, a sort of ASP.Net++ which could be called RSR.Net (Rich Server Resources) that is not service oriented. I would not be surprised in a year or two if Microsoft kills entirely its middleware division and makes it part of the Microsoft programming stack in an on premise/off premise google-app engine vision.

Microsoft is clearly in the strategic mode of "react to whatever google does", this is what killed Sun and this is what will kill Microsoft, make no mistake about it.

We are no longer in the 80s or early 90s where 'market share' was a competitive differentiator. Market share is the new legacy. Market share is the reason why companies die, unable to adapt their business model, always following, never leading, until they no longer have any resource left to follow. Just ask Sun about it.

I bet, today, there are a number of people with great ideas within Microsoft, and certainly Oslo was one of them (ok, with a better M3). All these people's innovation is being killed systematically because it is not "following" what Google is doing. This "strategic" mode happens when a leader becomes emotionally attached to the business model that made him or her successful, unable to think out of the box like a Steve Jobs, assembling technological progress in great business ventures (Pixar, iTunes, iPhone...).

Steve is the new Scott.

One of my colleague, point out to me that IBM is actively working on Business Entity Lifecycle and their relationship to SOA and BPM. Their effort is called BELA and is currently being integrated into SOMA.

Well, it looks like we now have a solid foundation for SOA and BPM and that there are actually some people that are willing to pass the hand waving and marketing brochure stage. This is very encouraging. I am wondering how many of the people that read or listen to Dave are failing versus, how many that are not listening to him are succeeding at building an SOA.

As I was letting my main computer install some of the latest Vista security updates, I looked for the the first time in 2 months at my google reader, and as you could guess, (Microsoft's) Dave Chappell's latest post caught my eye. Not sure why I missed his interview in 2008 but he basically explained then and now that "SOA is failing".

Dave and I have a long history. I related several times this incident in my previous posts but for the readers who don't know about it, I was sitting next to Dave at an Indigo (i.e. WCF) SDR (Software Design Review) back in 2004 or thereabout. At some point we engaged the conversation and I explained to Dave some of my views on how "orchestration" related to Service Orientation (i.e. as a Service Implementation technology and not (just) as a Service Orchestration technology). The difference is subtle and I explained many times my views on that question. At that point, Dave explained to me that I was wasting my career trying to say things that differed with what Microsoft was saying. He also spent a fair bit of time in the 2006-2007 timeframe explaining the Microsoft world why they should not look at SCA, in particular by rejecting the idea that an interoperable assembly mechanism had any value (thank you Dave, what an accomplishment !).

He did use these words "wasting your career". I guess he did not waste his.

Watching Dave's presentation is worth its dose of humor: "Object works as a design paradigm", "Reuse of business services does not work..., but... technical reuse, i.e .Net/JEE works", "ESB is just a bunch of vendors trying to sell you their good old integration gears", "Data access reuse works" ... and Dave goes on and on and on.

The astute reader would have probably made the connection that, indeed, the Connected System Division at Microsoft was failing so much that it had to put under the SQL Server division. What a demotion! I bet there are some partner architects that must feel a bit bitter about that. Ah...unless it is because "Data Access reuse works"? What do you think Dave?

How could a company that is unable to deliver a WSDL-first capability in its SOA tool set would understand anything about Service Orientation? I feel sad that Microsoft customers have to go through this kind of flawed arguments simply because Microsoft can't deliver something that can make them successful with Service Orientation:

Object works as a design paradigm: but of course Dave, this is why all enterprise application software is made up of Customer, Account, Product ... classes. We all know that. This is also why you add a couple of annotation to a "class" and voila, WCF spits out a service, and what a "service" that is.

ESB is just about integration: but of course Dave, and do you have the slightest idea about what loose coupling is and how WCF lets you achieve loose coupling? WCF is so loosely coupled that it can't even do WSDL-first

Reuse of business services does not work: but Dave, how can you implement a Business Service with WCF? have you even tried? can you show any example? Have you looked what they are doing with SCA? They even have events nowadays.

Data Access reuse works: but of course Dave, CRUD is a well know pattern that provides an infinite amount of reuse, actually you can reuse CRUD operations so much that every single consumer is going to implement the same logic, CRUDing around, and then when the data changes... ah badaboom, all client breaks.

What an accomplished career Dave !! I am jealous.

I'll never repeat it enough, SOA is unfamiliar, it does require that you scratch your head a bit, oh, not that much. What does not work is trying to do what you have been doing for 20 or 30 years with SOA technologies. It is not the SOA technologies that do not work, it is what you have been doing. Object Orientation does not work (with information) but loose coupling works, provided that you understand what it means. The reuse of business service works, provided that you understand how to build, version, govern and fund business services. Ah, and data access? no it does not work, exposing data access services to consumers is like pouring concrete over your enterprise applications, it looks smooth and slick until the day you need to change a few things.

I'll never say it enough, lots of things are changing if you want to build a service oriented architecture:

• Governance not just Project management
• Strategy and Goals not just Requirements
• Selection not just Specification
• Contract and Quality of Service not just Functionality
• Policies not just Rules
• Resources not just Data
• Lifecycles not just implementations
• Events not just messages
• Inter-actions not just invocations
• Assembly not just composiiton
• Federative not just Monolithic
• Forward versioning not just versioning
• Certification not just Test
• Publication not just Documentation
• Provision not just Deploy
• Threat not just Security
• Accountability not just Organization
• ...

The key to reuse Dave, because you seem to have no idea whatsoever about reuse, loose coupling and SOA, the key is forward versioning. What you have to understand Dave (sorry that's something that Microsoft is not saying) is that in SOA, what you reuse, is not an asset that was built last year, no, the old consumers of a service reuse a new version that was just built for a new consumer. Reuse is "forward" not "backward". As a consumer (and service provider) I prepare myself to allow the service to evolve without disruption. What a lack of imagination ! this is what happens in real life, as a consumer of physical services I rarely get impacted by changes in the services I consume (education, health, banking, insurance, groceries...). Life would be nightmare if we had to be notified of everything that is changing let alone do something about it. Reuse happens when versioning becomes seamless.

Speaking of generalization, I wonder if this whole “Slow REST” thingie is a pattern that’s going to pop up again often enough in the future that we should be thinking of a standardized recipe for approaching it; the kind of thing that has arisen for CRUD operations in the context of AtomPub and Rails.

Only the grand priests of RESTafaria could ever think in their own little mind that when they push the "Order" button on Amazon, the book or the other cool gears they just ordered show up at their door within less than a second.

It is very sad that decades of painful progress, ironically including XML, had to be undone by clueless CRUD nostalgists like Tim. For 30 years or more this type of people have pushed upon our industry a stateless (for whatever it means) CRUD-oriented synchronous programming model and shoved hundreds of billions of dollars in inefficiencies down the Enterprise throat. When will people finally understand that the patterns used to build a modern presentation layer are technical patterns and not constructs of information systems?

What's very interesting, I find, it that Cloud Computing and MEBAs in particular, make you rethink the architecture of information systems as you cannot find any excuse to not manage resource lifecycles, as you no longer need to deal with the state alignment problems across a supply chain.

Keep up the good work Tim ! Maybe you could write a little sample procurement app as a MEBA, with its resource lifecycles (order, shipment, payment). Maybe, just maybe, you will finally understand that world is ... slow. Since this is such an intrinsic property of the "things" that information systems keep track of, maybe, just maybe, one would think that such an intrinsic property of the physical world could be reflected in the programming model? Just my 2 (common) cents