Michael Platt talks   about the basic questions related to architects (what is architecture?; why are architects needed?; what are architects?; what skills do architects have?; and what are the types of architect). I agree with some of the things he says - especially the discussion on the architect skills.

I think Michael's definition of architecture is too simplistic (see more below) and I don't agree  with his classification of architects

 (here    is what I think on architecture types). For example he bundles solution architects under technical architects  I believe solution architect also have a lot to do with the problem domain and not just the technical or technological sides of the solution.

He also defines a "product architect" :

"Product level architects have an in depth understanding of the use of a specific product in a technical architecture domain such as Lotus notes in the messaging domain. Typical product architects are Exchange, SQL Server (normally as a DBA), Windows, and Networking etc"

I don't think that people under these roles are actually architects - they are definitely specialist and they may very well be experts but the breadth of their designs is very local in the scope of a complete solution and their skills will never be used on their own -  for example even if you do a data warehouse  project designing the database is (a very important) part of the project but there's still a lot to do with getting the data into there and deciding what data you want to store.

Architecture talks about things in the global (in the context of a project/solution/product line/enterprise) and design deals with local issues (how to model the UI, optimize the DB, set up Lotus Notes etc.)

What do you think?