Ask most software companies what their big innovation these days is, and the likely answer is Web services or Services Oriented Architectures - SOA.
In general, architectural shifts are scary for customer bases. May be an extreme example but in the mid 90s Oracle went from a character based user interface to its Smartclient to its Network Computing architecture in less than 3 years - thin, fat, thin...Who paid the price for this architectural thrashing? Customers.
SOA is even more ambitious - involving integration with outside applications and services. Over the last decade integration in the SAP world has meant ALE, EDI, IDoc, RFC, BAPI, DCOM, .NET, Java Connector. So now their ESA will be THE solution?
Why should users feel comfortable about Oracle's SOA when it is being compared to Frankenstein? Or when SAP's definitions are still fluid?
Innovation to me is when you go "wow", not "gulp"....
