Its decision to do so illustrates one of the conundrums (conundra?) when building a loosely-coupled services infrastructure (which all on-demand SaaS implementations are, as I recently explained). ZapThink’s Jason Bloomberg has just posted a superb analysis of The Lego Model of SOA in which he uses the Lego analogy to highlight both advantages and drawbacks of service-oriented architecture. Here’s the pertinent one:

“The larger you build a structure with Lego blocks, however, the more fragile it gets. In other words, loose coupling comes at a price. While tightly coupled interfaces reduce flexibility and reusability, they also can increase efficiency. Loose coupling, on the other hand, can limit the efficiency of the implementation.”

Read more at: ZDNet