Yes, of course Don makes money when someone buys one of his COM books. I'm sure he will also make money from an XML book he is writing with a couple of other DevelopMentor guys. Is his XML book a 'Microsoft' book, no, in fact I think the book uses Suns XML parser for example code!

Doesn't the history of XMLRPC show that they both worked closely with Microsoft engineers at Microsoft...

But the spec is still public and based on HTTP and XML. So it really doesn't matter what Microsoft decide to do with SOAP, other people can still decide to do other things with it. At DevelopMentor we see SOAP as being a cross-platform technology.

I've spent most of my programming life working with Windows and I long for a day when I can make method calls from any client platform into any server platform. SOAP just codifies a way of achieving this, nothing more, nothing less.

The thrust behind SOAP, at least at DevelopMentor, is that wire-level interop is just enough interop. We don't care what component model you use, in fact you don't even have to use a component model at all. We were hoping that SOAP would help douse the object-war flames not add to them. Looks like we're going to be disappointed...