Podcasts: SOA middleware takes the lead in this installation of the SOA Report. Research reports, in fact, indicate that SOA outperforms mere Web services applications, with lower application lifecycle costs, better throughput for projects and higher levels of user satisfaction, David Linthicum explains. “You can expose everything as a service and get no value from that. You have to be able to put a middleware infrastructure on top of that to orrchestrate those services into solutions, and that provides the agility aspect, the solutions-roiented aspect, the reuse aspect of it. The notion that people are going to basically Web service-enable things and call that an SOA is absolutely silly.” Tune into The SOA Report here. Columnist’s corner: Tom Yager bids adieu to Office 2004 for Mac while welcoming iWork ’08 and new Apple hardware. “The big news from Apple’s Town Hall is the three models of completely redone iMacs,” he writes in New Apple iCandy dazzles. “As I predicted, Apple has overhauled .Mac to make it the burgeoning center of Apple’s online universe.”The news beat: SAP lays out a road map for PLM, as in product lifecycle management, that extends until 2010. Open source database maker Ingres names a new CEO, Roger Burkhardt. Cisco CEO John Chambers predicts that Web 2.0 will spur growth akin to the Internet bubble of the 1990’s. And today is the one-year mark until the 2008 Olympic Games begin in Beijing, and issues such as 3G telephony and wireless Internet have yet to be resolved. Notes from the field: With the feeling that everyone around him is missing something really, really big, Cringe wonders about Google’s offer to the meet the $4.6 billion minimum for bidding on chunks of the 700-MHz spectrum now used for analog TV broadcasts. “Personally, I love the casual way Google flashes its roll, show us all those billion dollar bills, and says, ‘if you just do some things our way, you can have some of this,'” Cringe explains. “The G-men can do just about anything they want at this point, including becoming the world’s biggest wireless ISP.” Welcome to Googlian’s Island. Technology Industry