Credit goes to Dion for bringing this (witty) alternate abbreviation to my attention. The TSS posting about BEA pushing Service Oriented Architecture brought to my attention how SOA is a magic marketing term that pretends to somehow wrap SOAP/Web Services in a way that precludes bad design. (My full comments here.)

Just more bait for PHBs to think they need to spend money on something they can already do today. In fact, SOA may itself be bad design if applications are unnecessarily decoupled in this way (which seems a likely result, given the way it’s being pushed).