Don Box put out his predictions for 2005, including #3 which states that the term SOA will be replaced by some new hype-word invented by the marketing wonks of various software and industry analysis companies.

As I said months ago, the S in SOA is a dollar sign. SOA is much more hype than reality, which means it is created and defined by marketing people far more than it is by actual computer scientists or engineers.

As is often the case with over-hyped concepts, the terms related to those concepts rapidly become meaningless. What is SOA? Depends on which vendor you ask. What is a service? Depends on which vendor you ask. It is all a meaningless jumble here at the start of 2005.

Of course the concept is too valuable to marketeers[1] for them to give up just because a term has been lost. So I am sure Don is right and marketing groups at Microsoft, IBM, Gartner and many other organizations are busily working to decide on the next term or terms to use for a while.

So for better or worse SOA itself isn’t dead, but I agree that the term is living on borrowed time.

[1] Yes, I know the term is marketers, but that extra “e” in there makes it sound so much more, well, Disney somehow