It's interesting to me how SOAP has so much hype, and (apparently) so little actual usage. The blogging world has adopted XML-RPC and simple post mechanisms; Amazon sports two API's - SOAP and a simple url based system. The latter is much more heavily used. This seems to mirror what happened with CORBA - a lot of hype, a few vendors got heavily into it, and a few IT shops made heavy use of it. The rest yawned. Manageability explains it like this:

I also think that standards groups tend to choose the lowest common denominator of innovation. That is, standards groups tend to only approve innovation that they all collectively grasp, however in most cases innovation tends to be grasped only by a few.

Another problem with standards groups tend to create documentation rather than implementation. That is a fatal flaw which I explored in "Be Liberal in What You Accept, Conservative in What You Send". The lack of a standard compliance implementation undermines interoperability, the core essence of standardization.

It's interesting that standards groups give the participants an illusion of choice. Unfortunately, history clearly shows their fate is preordained.

There's something to this. Standards that grow up around actual usage patterns are going to fare better than the "theoretical" ones.