Service-oriented software is being hailed as the next revolutionary approach to software development. Service orientation allows organizations to rapidly and dynamically form new software applications to meet changing business needs, thus alleviating the software evolution problems that occur with traditional applications. The largest of these problems is the need to understand existing software before changing it. This article looks ahead toward the automated construction of service-oriented software, discussing software understanding in the context of service orientation and identifying potential new problems. The authors conclude that, while service orientation certainly helps solve some aspects of the evolution problem, software comprehension takes a new and potentially more challenging role.