I stumbled across a wonderful bit of prose on the blogosphere today.  Jim Butler mused:

There’s a place where good acronyms go to die.  I call it the GAG (Good Acronym Graveyard).  It’s a dark foreboding place where over-hyped acronyms lie interred separated from their perfectly valid and useful living legacies.

Jim then went on to write an enjoyable piece about the burial of “AI” (Artificial Intelligence, not the movie) and the recent demise of “SOA”.  Commenting on AI’s passing, Jim wrote:

The principles and techniques of AI have been staggeringly successful, but the over-hyped term and its unreasonable expectations rest in peace in the GAG.

He then prefaced his remarks on the passing of SOA by quoting Anne Thomas Manes:

SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession.  SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on “services”.

I particularly enjoyed Jim’s final thoughts:

Requiem

And so we gather together on this cold day in January of 2009 to lay to rest the body of SOA, but not its spirit. We do not mourn this passing as untimely or empty. Rather we rejoice in the opportunity to move past empty promises and impossible expectations.

Perhaps now that the GAG is sporting yet another tombstone, we can attend to the real business of enterprise transformation through service orientation. Perhaps we can even throw in a little AI for good measure… D’OH!!!

So, what is TLA? “Three Letter Acronym,” of course. Should we carve a tombstone for it, as well?

Technorati Tags: Acronym, AI, SOA, TLA