How will vendors differentiate?

Farber: The biggest barrier is the resistance of vendors to be part of something where their differentiation is far less than in a proprietary world.

Gardner: If they come up with an enterprise service bus, that becomes in a sense proprietary. But I'm seeing two definitions of SOA. One is the more technical one that you're alluding to, but from the buy side, there's enough confusion that people are lumping basic reuse and and object oriented and component computing into one category. This enables the vendors to all say, "Oh yeah, we do that." I hope we're not getting into another two years of gray mystery.