The SOAP stack is generally regarded as an embarrassing failure these days.

It's like this: The time between having an idea and its public launch is measured in days not months, weeks not years.

The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don't know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups.

...wisdom is in large part the knowledge of how to avoid doing dumb things, and thus grows globally as a function of the published inventory of stupid mistakes.

For heavens sake, if you haven’t gotten comfy with Agile techniques and thinking, get on it right now.