The article seemed a bit weak, since depending on the problem set the choice is either apples and oranges or completely moot. Saying that HTTP + JSON is going to throw your developers for a loop is a bit embarrassing. The "hard" part is always in the data model itself, inside the container, which isn't magically solved by a given transport or serialization approach.

I've been the client to a few SOAP services which were "standard" but which contained object representations implemented by people who probably learned XML while severely inebriated and chose their tags vs. attributes using some Post-Its and a dart board.