SOA vendors bad at explaining their own products

Dave Linthicum at ZapThink argues that vendors use unsophisticated approaches for selling their products. The reason is that they cannot explain them to the customers, and this is especially true for SOA:

"They do know how to list buzzwords they think will "wow" their prospects and existing customers. However, in many cases, the customers become further confused or, worse, don't even get the core concept behind the product, not to mention SOA...//...Most vendors have never sold an architecture before, just tactical products that service some specific purpose."

Joe McKendrick comments on the article above and pretty much hits the nail on the head:

"One of the challenges with SOA, at least from a vendor perspective, is that ultimately, it’s a philosophy, not a tangible product. And, ultimately, SOA provides a way to extend and deploy functionality without the original vendor."

In reality, many vendors are just wrapping their monolitic products in new buzzwords, be it SOA or Enterprise 2.0. They might have modified their products and their technologies to support SOA or to include tools as blogs, RSS and Wikies - but have they really understood and practiced the underlying philosophies?