Best of the blogs: Now that we’ve been over the five main reasons that SOAs fail, and corresponding causes of success, it’s time to look, with a healthy respect, at the question of just how much ROI a service oriented architecture can provide. “Everyone is talking about this study from Nucleus Research stating that SOA is having limited success when considering ROI,” David Linthicum reports in this Real World SOA post. He adds that he suspects the respondents were discussing small projects that pretty much counted a bunch of Web services as an SOA. “The larger issue is that SOA, at the end of the day, is a systemic change in the way organizations approach enterprise architecture. Thus, the benefits will only be understood when the architecture has undergone that change.”Columnist’s corner: It’s a question that was bound to come up sooner rather than later: Does Vista suck? Choosing to stay out of OS holy wars, Oliver Rist elevates the discussion to a more practicable level for systems admins, consultants, integrators, and for that matter, just about anyone. “Does Vista suck enough that businesses of any size should simply throw up their hands and migrate over to something else?” he poses. “All due respect to the Apple orchard and open source, but my answer is ‘No.'” Rist goes on to give it passing grades across a range of subjects, including installation, networking, security, application and hardware compatibility — though a pair of those did fall under the ‘pass grudgingly’ category. “Are there parts of Vista I really hate? Sure.” Mobility: Not all is perfect on the so-called infinite loop in Cupertino, either. Apple’s insistence on keeping the way-over-hyped iPhone closed just so happens to be paving the way for Linux momentum to beget, well, even more momentum as a cell-phone platform. “LinuxWorld Expo 2007 basked in Apple’s unwitting generosity, with one booth after another featuring fledgling mobile Linux projects prospecting for funding, direction, and developers. The whole exhibit floor had the feel of a mining town that was just getting its footing,” Tom Yager reports in Closed iPhone opens road for Linux. “As I said about iPhone, bragging about running an open OS on your device, when source code for said device is not published, is noise.” Technology Industry