Thanks to Paul Ramsey, Bill Dollins, Morten Nielsen and others, Microsoft has said that they plan to implement longitude-latitude ordering in WKB and WKT for both the geography and geometry types. Bill put it best IMO as to why this change needed to happen with SQL Server 2008.
For me, the issue is consistency. Regardless of the mindsets of professionals vs. non-professionals or the imprecision of the OGC spec, the bottom line is that the same call behaves differently for two related data types.
Now sure it would have been possible to work around this, but it makes no sense for Microsoft to do things different from everyone else. Now I still see Microsoft using the GML example of axis order to justify their choice, but given that the standard is long/lat I can’t understand why they’d want to be different.
Now you know why folks such as Howard Butler were “unhappy” that Google named their blog Google LatLong rather than the more correct Google LongLat.
Man, this place looks expensive. I feel like I’m wasting a fortune just standing here.