Why was Roy Fielding's thesis on REST not adopted immediately? Roy Fielding's thesis ( Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures  ) was not implemented/adopted immediately, was there any specific reason for this ? The thesis was submitted in 2000, however the REST architectural design became popular in the last 3/4 years. I may be wrong but that's why I like to know better. I understand that under SOA, SOAP was popular and well standardized before the REST era. Was this lapse in adoption a function of academic or industrial factors ?

Maybe the evaluation was insufficient or not convincing  enough for real world deployments. What academic lessons can be drawn from this ?
If someone claims that (s)he found something good, then that alone is not enough. Mistakes happen, even without mistakes correct conclusions given the evidence present can later proof to be incorrect. So a single publication alone is often not enough, it needs checking by others, replications, etc. before a conclusion is widely accepted. That takes time.