Metcalfe's Law and SOA

More and more I'm finding parallels between the concepts of SOA and technical and business ideas. I was planning on posting some comments that I have on Neal Stephenson's excellent essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line". I was introduced to the essay through an internal presentation made here at my company by D. Calvin Andrus a week or so before I left for the Vienna FTF meeting of the SOA Reference Model. Here's the blog connection: in this presentation, he discussed Wiki and Blogs as a technology incarnation that supports continuous learning and adaptation and complexity theory. One of the slides had a screen shot from his own blog, from 5 January 2005. This particular post focused on Neal Stephenson's essay. I was intrigued enough to print out a copy to read on the airplane ride over the Atlantic. I have several notes on the content on links between his ideas and my own ideas on Service Oriented Architecture. However, now that 2 weeks have passed, I needed to go back to the presentation to find the actual URL to his blog. Along the way, I saw another slide in the presentation focused on Metcalfe's Law and Disruption. It was speaking more of the role of 'link creation' in the development of new intellectual capital, but it prompted me to find out some more about Metcalfe's Law and think about how it relates to SOA. Along the way, I found an article by George Glidder titled "Metcalfe's Law and Legacy". This article states Metcalfe's law of the telecosm shows the magic of interconnections. Glidder goes on to demonstrate the power of potential connections not only in technology terms, but also in economic terms - for personal wealth as well as the creation of additional wealth in the economy. What's also interesting though, is that Metcalfe himself recognized that "In other words, it is the stations, rather than the network, that have to sort out and "switch" the messages." It goes on to state that while the concept of a figurative ether survives in modern communications, there isn't a literal ether that exists omnipresently to propagate communications - and dive into a discussion of ethernet and ATM.

One of the ideas that resonates well with me is that SOA is really about applying the lessons learned from the history of commerce to technology. I'll have to talk about that more later. Essentially, that's why I really appreciate articles and information that recognize SOA as more than the next wave of technology. But what I've now also started thinking about is what we can learn from what we already know.

So, how do we recognize that SOA isn't just about the potential connections that can be made - but just as much about the 'stations' or the players in SOA and how they uuse the interconnections? What does it mean 'to be about' when we talk about SOA? Heh, that's a topic to mull over another day - but it seems initially to be about the value, emergence and mindset of SOA. There's a relationship there between people, process, and infrastructure with the technology, but none of them stand alone; just like the interconnections themselves don't stand alone - nor have value alone.

I have also started thinking about the A in SOA - architecture and wondering if the way that SOA is typically approached is 'treating the ether as literal'? How does it change the approach to system architecture and design of a distributed system when the connections (and hence the network) isn't robustly connected always present entity?

So, these are my thoughts today. Unbaked as they are, I want to follow them through at some point.