I am eagerly awaiting delivery of my Nintendo Wii Fit so that I can snowboard and ski in the comfort of my living room. The Wii has changed the way that people play electronic games. No longer do I have to contort five of my fingers in a specific manner to cut open a patient or have an 8 year old tell me how to play soccer; a game that I have played for many years.
Here is a new way for humans and computers to interact and it is available for the masses. Even my sister, a self confessed hater of anything with a keyboard and screen attached, is telling me how she has completed the latest run on the snowboard. (She is in England where for the first time in living memory the electronic toys have been released before us in the US.)
Anyway, the way that computers and humans have interacted has had a large impact on new possibilities and the increasing the demands on processing power, i.e. you can do a lot more with DOS than with punch cards, and more with RIA than DOS. But imagine what you can do when you are wearing the interface and how many more users will now want to access the system... (See how many Wiis are sold compared to its competitors.)
SOA What? You are creating and designing your SOA infrastructure with web services, portals and RIA applications in mind, but can it scale up and provide the ability to allow the masses to access your systems and provide services that we have not thought of at this time? The vision of the future is here. Can you and your SOA adapt???