SOA, ESB’s, SOAP and a plethora of other alphabet-soups colluding to increase, not decrease complexity have plagued enterprises and enterprise software for years. Enterprise software vendors, consultancies, and “analysts” such as Forrester, Gartner et al have been at the center of this movement, eagerly cheered on by Enterprise Architects whose careers depend on creating complexity they then get paid top dollar for to manage.

Calling SOA in its enterprise incarnation a spectacular failure would be the understatement of the decade. SOA efforts in most enterprises have not lead to cost savings, they have led to bewildering complexity and massive sunk costs. Complexity disguised as “consolidation”, “standards compliance” or “re-use” can simply never succeed.
The irony of this whole affair is that the promise of “SOA” already had been delivered in other areas – it’s called the Unix-approach, small and simple applications that only do one thing, but do it well, that can be piped together into a bigger whole.

What worked for the Unix-approach was that it was not top-down based as most modern SOA efforts, instead it was a bottom-up approach: little utilities where built to scratch a particular itch. Eventually it emerged that these little itch-scratchers could be combined to scratch even bigger itches, but this was not by design, it was by virtue of being small, specialized and good at one thing only.

This specialization is emerging once again outside of the Unix OS, in what is buzzwordily referred to as “The Cloud”: Google Apps can be used for e-mail and personal productivity, Twitter for messaging, RSS for information distribution/dissemination, Google Maps for location aware services and context, Amazon Web Services for computing and storage.
Small pieces, loosely joined. What they all have in common is that they did not emerge out of some grand, top-down scheme, but as individual services designed to do one thing only, but do that one thing well.
By “accident”, it just so happens to emerge that these services created by disparate organizations for disparate reasons actually provide the infrastructure for most of the computing and communication needs that exist in organizations large and small. Integrate them and you have something very powerful, based on Service Orientation if you will, build more small features and services on top of them, and you can potentially unleash yet another wave of innovation and improvement.

The future is Service Oriented, just not in the leviathan top-down way that Enterprise Architects around the world imagined – the Service Orientation is open, and it emerges from the bottom-up, almost by accident as a multitude of people and organizations scratch their own itches, then find ways of combining their own services with those of others again and again in new ways and permutations.