Over on his blog, Todd Biske comments, in two entries, on the "socialization of SOA" discussion. He provides a nice balanced viewpoint that's well worth reading.
I think that in this discussion, Dion may have partially fallen right into the trap that my column warned about, which is believing that the "best" technical answer is the best overall answer. Having a team or organization adopt a new approach, regardless of its technical merit, is rarely a technical problem.
Many of you are probably aware that with somewhere around 350 employees, IONA is not a large company. However, what you may not know is that our employees are located at a variety of sites across the planet, and it's been this way for most of the past decade. For example, we have developers in Dublin, St. Johns in Newfoundland, Boston, Beijing, and a number of home offices in other countries. We have sales engineers in all those sites and more. If there's anything I've learned over the past 6 or 7 years of being IONA's chief architect/engineer, it's that far-flung developers have a much larger variety of skills and experiences than you might expect. I wish I had a dollar for every time I mistakenly assumed that even the developers around the corner, let alone those on the other side of the planet, shared my opinions and experiences regarding a particular technology. When your development team represents as many countries, cultures, and backgrounds as ours does, you quickly learn not to make assumptions about such things. You always have to keep in mind that not everyone shares your assumptions about what the "best" technologies and approaches are.
For someone in my position, simply decreeing that "this technology is better than that one" doesn't solve this issue. The only way to get folks to agree to move in a particular direction (assuming you're not running a sweatshop) is to get their buy-in. Part of getting their buy-in is to make sure they're informed. Making sure they're informed relies, at least in part, on the communication and socialization of the ideas, concepts, strategies, and tactics involved.