This piece from Dare Obasanjo hot on the heels of the UDDI public registry closure adds weight to my suspicion that SOAP is finally being sidelined into a niche activity.

When I worked on the XML team, I used to interact regularly with the Indigo folks. At the time, I got the impression that they had two clear goals (i) build the world's best Web services framework built on SOAP & WS-* and (ii) unify the diverse distributed computing offerings produced by Microsoft. As I spent time on my new job I realized that the first goal of Indigo folks didn't jibe with the reality of how we built services. Despite how much various evangelists and marketing folks have tried to make it seem otherwise, SOAP based Web services aren't the only Web service on the planet. Technically they aren't even the most popular. If anything the most popular Web services is RSS which for all intents and purposes is a RESTful Web service. Today, across our division we have services that talk SOAP, RSS, JSON, XML-RPC and even WebDAV. The probability of all of these services being replaced by SOAP-based services is 0.