Simplify and Exaggerate
Today’s best sellers in the world of business books are not like they were a decade ago. While the most influential writers had their background from magazines like The Harvard Business Review some years ago, today they’re more likely to write for The New Yorker or Wired. Writers like Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson have skyrocketed as the leading thinkers in the world of business literature, and even tapped into the larger consumer market with their astute observations of the business world.
Their secret is to follow the old axiom of simplifying and exaggerating rather than being too concerned with complications. I do the same with many of my talks, and just like milestone books like “The World is Flat” and “The Long Tail”, I too have been criticized for not having a balanced enough presentation of my material.
This is very apparent on the ratings for my “Want SOA? Throw out your Web Services!”-talk on the ongoing MSDN Live tour. The ratings I get are very polar, most people give my talk a four or five (on a one to five scale), but quite a few give me a one. Surprisingly there are very few in-between.
I’ve shaped this talk to provoke a reaction and challenge the way most people think about SOA. I also know that my full-on attack on established “best practices” for service oriented architectures is uncomfortable for those who have spent time and money building their SOAs to these principles. My question to you is do you see any return on investment?
Even if it might seem like it when I give the talk, I’m not offering a panacea for all your SOA challenges. I am however showing you a different way of thinking about service orientation than the too-tired reuse oriented layered web services model. Hopefully this gets you thinking about whether the SOA we’re used to really solved the challenges it addressed, or if we’ve been lured into a vendor trap where the solution to one technical problem just unveils two more.
I think Torbjørn nailed it in his latest Contiki Strip installment, don’t just do something because I or anybody else tells you so.
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