Buses

Reading your stuff in a desperate attempt to grok (or understand) exactly what an ESB is ... a thought comes to mind - is the term "application" now dead? Ie. Everything is a service. So the client does not have applications any more, but has services? Is that the mindset we are looking to?

Interesting, there are times when buses are good and times when not so. Since year dot Intel have been making CPU's that connect to their memory (RAM) through a bus, sometimes referred to as the FSB or "Front Side Bus". AMD (the major competitor to Intel in the x86 CPU space) came up with an alternate architecture a few years ago, a direct connect architecture (DCA) called Hypertransport. It worked, it was a lot faster than FSB and memory latencies were greatly reduced, giving a tremendous boost to application performance, a supreme innovation which led to them stealing 20% of the market.

Intel in their next generation processors out this year will also be moving away from FSB to a DCA :)

So in a time-critical performance sense, buses aren't so good.