While reading the comments in Steve’s initial ESB post, I spotted a paragraph that nailed the elephant-in-the-room meta issue on the head;

Its funny but so few people who also use ESB and WS-* style protocols and tools frequently operate with such disdain for other ways of doing things.

There are, of course, a very large number of automated solutions to a particular problem. But of all of them, only a few will exhibit the desired properties, to the proper degree, that you require for the environment in which it is to be deployed. The more you require, the fewer the number of suitable solutions.

IMO, if you don’t feel disdain towards a lot (97%?) of these solutions, then you simply don’t understand what it means to be a software architect.

I’m with Stefan. Steve Vinoski’s always been somebody you want to listen very carefully to regarding distributed computing and enterprise integration, but even more so now that he’s left the employ of a company with skin in that game. That message isn’t entirely new, it’s just more obviously the message 8-)