Microsoft bides its time with SOA

My colleague Dana Gardner observes in his most recent post that Microsoft is notably absent from the Service Component Architecture/Service Data Objects initiatives that the other major vendors are supporting.

As Dana observes: "Microsoft will pursue its proprietary approach of baking pseudo-SOA into its operating system stack as long as it can."

It could be argued that Microsoft likes to play by its own rules, other vendors and their consortia be damned.

But the bottom line is that Microsoft doesn't play by its own rules, but by the rules of disruptors. This vendor has a long history of intentionally going after the emerging high-volume, low-margin markets -- those potential customers that have not yet been served by a technology because that technology has been too expensive. (Note that Microsoft itself has been disrupted in many areas, Linux and Google being two examples.)

SOA is still a luxury of the well-heeled corporations, and we see plenty of vendors chasing the Big SOA dollars there. SOA is still a high-end, high-margin business of the few. Microsoft certainly can afford to sit and wait for the high-volume, commoditized end of the market to take off -- offering cheap, incremental, SOA tools and platforms to those that couldn't afford it in the first wave.

As noted in my previous post, Butler Group just issued a report that that day of reckoning is fast approaching. And Microsoft has already made statements against Big SOA and for low-level incremental efforts -- a play to the high-volume space.