Jean-Jacques answers my question:

"

I have to wonder about this kind of criticism - it's like criticizing a car for not being a boat - but why are you looking at cars?

Well the reason why we have to go through this kind of discussion is precisely because we need boats and the RESTifarians are trying to sell us cars for every transportation need. For them buses, airplanes and boats are useless since we have cars. When they will hit the water, they'll build a bridge. The REST of us are simply requesting to be left alone.

This is the same type of discussion I had with Nick Malick. Just like Nick, the RESTifarians come up with arguments that only hold in LaLaLand and the rest of us have to deal with the consequences. We, in the trenches, have to justify our choices (more complex and more expensive) to our employers and co-workers because someone wants to rule the world"

Wow. Jean-Jacques has more or less described  how I've felt about commercial WS-* technology for years, and better than I ever could. There's a great irony here that we shouldn't lose sight of :) I really would like to meet up some day.

"The funny thing is that even though you say (and think) that REST is great and should be used where applicable, this is not enough for these people. They want complete victory, eradicate the world from all form of middleware, HTTP rule. They can't even listen to themselves anymore."

I did wonder if Jean-Jacques was seeing some crazy pitches in his day work ("All I can guess at is that Jean-Jacques is seeing nonsense designs being shooed in and justified as being RESTful"), and it seems he has. But to be clear on one thing because he's talking about REST/BPM/WS as competing/interfering commercial approaches. I have no chip in that game. I'm on the record about REST hype being a problem before there was REST hype. That said, I have seen REST/Web as being a better fit in places where I had to stay up late or work on weekends dealing with RPC/SOAP/WS issues ;)

"They are trying to sell you the "scalability' of the Web when hardly anyone need to build systems like this (except Amazon, Google and Yahoo). Is that a scam guys? are you playing the tail-head thing?"

As an aside, for my part, I think if we're talking about scale issues, then data volumes are a big looming problem, that worries me more than bandwidth or multicore. The big web properties have hit this first and have built specialised technology to deal with it, but it's going to spread beyond them in the next decade, right down to individuals having too much data to manage. A direct outcome will be the need to manage decentralised datasets (not just shards) and probably URIs will feature in that as entity keys. Another outcome I think will be that search and tagging will replace the desktop metaphor for user interfaces.