I was reading Joe McKendric’s blog entry on the rising cost of debugging and the blame falling on SOA and I particularly noticed his concluding remarks...”Hmmm. The purpose of SOA — and Web 2.0 for that matter — is to simplify things” - I couldn’t disagree more.  I have been thinking long and hard about what really is the goal of SOA and I have to say I have never thought this was one of them.  SOA isn’t about making it simpler, it is about making it more manageable which is absolutely not the same thing.  Take car engines today as an example.  They are much more efficient at delivering power for much less fuel burn, smoothly and reliably, but are they simpler?  To use, yes, but not to design, build and “debug”.  I used to be able to fix my old VW’s engine in an afternoon with a hand full of tools from the local autoparts store - today’s engines can’t even be diagnosed with out specialist computerized equipment.  SOA is young and thus the toolset to support SOA is young too - it will catch up and debugging will ultimately become easier than it is today but that was never the actual goal.

I will make time soon to write a longer blog on what I think SOA is actually all about, but for now let me go on record as saying it isn’t “simplifying” anything.