How popular the word "Service" is now? When I was watching the video about BizTalk in Channel 9. Look at the title: "Service Oriented Architecture, Software as a Service, Software + Services, Enterprise Service Bus, Internet Service Bus, BizTalk Services".  I also heard the phase "Integration as Service", "On-demand Service" What a Service!

Steve Swartz mentioned a good point: "Service in SOA is not as same as the service in Software+Service". Ah! It is interesting to understand "service-orientation" when comparing to "object-orientation". Think both of them as a discipline in software development environment. Object orientation is applied in local application while service orientation is applied to distributed application. And David Chappell gave his great definition for SOA: Serious Overloaded Algorithm!

It seems true that there is no single global definitions for these words and it is quite common that people think differently. Steve also pointed out that the analysts or companies are just reengineering the words to make money.

I dig some stories out... see who are those companies. :)

Sun defined SOA in the late 1990s to describe Jini, which is an environment for dynamic discovery and use of services over a network.

Sonic Software and Gartner originally used the term ESB to refer to the XML-enabled SonicXQ MOM (Message-oriented middleware) product (which was later renamed "SonicESB")

Microsoft defined S+S when Ray Ozzie did his keynote in MIX last year.

And last week, Microsoft BizTalk Lab created "Internet Service Bus"!