I haven't been keeping up with the technology developments behind SOAP for the last few years. There's more than just SOAP+WSDL and a pipe dream called UDDI. There's also WS-Security, WS-Routing and others. Edd Dumbhill discusses why SOAP and the rubber-stamp WS-I consortium poses a long-term threat to the web.
I'm beginning to wonder if the web is large enough of a place that the WS-I-blessed web services infrastructure can exist alongside The Web as described by The Director. Right now, I'm up in the air but the signs point to yes. The standard usage of web services that proponents are vaguely alluding to (and the ones that Clay Shirky is describing) are mostly deployed within an intranet, where no one really much cares about interoperability with some random user in Kuala Lampur. If two WS-I favorable organizations want to link their intranets together with WS-I type gooey bits, then let them.
But that does sound like a very slippery path to a world where all public services are WS-I approved, because everyone is already using them. And that's enough of a reason to make Web Services actually part of the web proper, or drop the "web" from their name.
