Via Bill de hÓra, I ran across this from Michael Champion:

I've yet to see compelling, detailed, practical examples where real business are solving the problems that WS-* addresses with only HTTP+XML (unless one ignores the bazillion person-hours and immense amounts of code that industrial-strength web sites have so far had to deploy). And I'm still waiting for pragmatic guidance on exactly how to put these ideas in practice for an organization that needs something more complex than a stock quote service.

Which problems is WS* appropriate for again? It looks an awful lot like the exact same problems that CORBA was (and is, for that matter) approriate for. Which is to say, a small number of problems that a small number of people run across.

Here's the dirty secret that most developers - and most assuredly, most development managers - don't want to have to admit: Most of the problems they are confronted with just aren't that complicated. The complexity comes from the developers and managers themselves, who insist on reading the latest set of buzzwords with near reverence - and who then decide that all the software they currently have written in X needs to be redone in Y because... well, because it would be cool.

Sure, there are some hard problems out there. However, most people aren't working on them. They are instead making the simple complex with a vast array of overly complex crap, like the full J2EE stack or WS*.