This time around I am trying to think aloud and instead of sharing my humble experience with a particular technology, I am thinking about what technology trends have meant to us over the years?
The world has seen so many paradigms of 'ultimate architecture' through the decades. Starting with procedural code/architecture and moving all the way to todays Service Oriented Architecture which by the way is being touted as a panacea to all the technological situations. It seems very amusing to me that for one reason or another through space and time, we always manage to think/devise a situation where the current architecture would not suffice and then its time to think of a new one :)
My take on the whole SOA storm is that it certainly is as nice as being told yet it may not be applicable to every situation that may arise e.g. for any performance related application with response under milliseconds you just dont have the liberty to expense units of time over serialization (which becomes inevitable in most cases for SOA).
Also any architecture and its popularity has a strong invisble coupling with the infrastructure of the day since 10 years ago we just did not possess the same processing power as we do today and thats one of the driving factors for architecutres of the SOA-like which are expensive nevertheless their expense is diminished by processing power available.
Having said all the above, in a bigger picture no single architecutre can be a universal solution for all the given problems since its a blatant truth that with time evolution, the problems also become more sophisticated and intricate. And as they say tommorrow is a new day, so you will have another storming architecture in some time yet again and the circle of technology will keep revolving....
You can find discussion on SOA at Andreas Blog (http://weblogs.asp.net/abrunvol/archive/2004/07/16/185516.aspx).