The web made simple ubiquitous and potentially homogenous, and then, unsurprisingly, vendors (all the people Bosworth worked for) have been working hard to make it more complicated than it needs to be.

I can see why some shops will resist change, in part it will be as a result of some of the real pain and horror storys out there. I’ve seen some pretty big projects go off the rails thanks to Microsoftitecture, or, perhaps more fairly put, theme-of-the-day architecture. On one very large product development I’m aware of, Microserfs pushed an agenda and the older, experienced, sane folks hesitated in pushing back. Hundreds of person-years of development later, they scrapped the “pass everything between every object known to man as xml” architecture (performance well and truly sucked) and went largely back to what they’d been doing, successfully, before.