There's definitely an opportunity to miss the boat, and it's important to have people shouting "hey, the boat over there is leaving, figure out whether you want to be on board."
One problem is that the harbor is full of boats going to different destinations, and some of them smell a lot like the Flying Dutchman [doomed to never reach shore]. I would be happy to miss that boat!

Another issue is one of mindshare / attention span: Lots of stuff such as XmlHttpRequest and Javascript DOM that have nice trendy acronyms such as REST and AJAX today are late-1990's technology that MS helped pioneer but has finally gotten critical mass. Maybe we're in the boat BUILDING business, not the boat catching business? The trick is to figure out what types of boats people will want in 5-10 years.

MS definitely can't become complacent and assume that Indigo or any of the other XML-related stuff coming out in the next year or so will magically handle all the concerns that are driving the events you mention. I agree there's a danger of that, but I'm not too worried about not noticing that the boat has left until it's too late. The stuff we're doing in WebData to make XML more palatable to non-geeks could actually help something like Alpine get traction outside the community of XML purists it is aimed at. Likewise, RESTful services will need easier-to-use plain ol' XML tools to really take off, with or without a new description langugae. I'm not going to bet that the Alpine approach or REST approach will win big over the object interchange approach that Indigo addresses, but I don't think Microsoft as a company will miss either of those boats if they do go somewhere and WS-* does not. Executive hyperbole aside, they are not REALLY betting the company on Indigo / WS-* ... there are a lot of less visible teams providing all sorts of fallback positions.

I'm still puzzled that so many people missed the simplest lesson of XML's success: we did away with mandatory DTDs, and suddenly everyone was excited about using markup. Perhaps the WS-* people could apply the same idea to WSDL, XSD, and friends.

I'm supporting SOAP/WSDL-based web services right now where my competitors all have simple HTTP and XML/querystring APIs and I cannot exagerate how much of a PITA SOAP and WSDL are. They make the simplest things outrageously complex for the average web developer.

And I have no idea what the benefits of the added complexity are.

Unfortunately, REST is never going to go anywhere while it remains an "approach". Someone needs to explain with some precision how to implement REST.

Why can't more services implement web APIs like Backpack's which any CGI programmer could implement in an hour and can be documented in their entirety on one page!!!!

http://www.backpackit.com/api/

Here:

http://geekswithblogs.net/rebelgeekz/archive/2005/06/01/41364.aspx

Vive la revolution!