Back when Web services standards were being devised, Microsoft was head of the pack. It was one of the main supporters of the WS-* family of specifications that found a home at the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). Microsoft was all for "open" at the Web-interoperability level. Now, a new series of SOA standards is headed to OASIS, ones that could create a whole market segment around SOA common programmatic principles. Microsoft, however, is absent from the definitions process around service component architecture (SCA) and its sibling, service data objects (SDO). That could mean that Redmond will pursue a proprietary approach to bake what I'd call pseudo-SOA into its operating system stack.
As John Bell, enterprise architect at Marriott International Inc., recently pointed out during a BriefingsDirect podcast, such a tack is not new to Microsoft:
