quoted from the OWB dev list: annotation just for binding specific beans to a literal name, the other one uses it for differentiate between multiple beans. Even this should be no immediate issue for JSR 299's typesafe resolution mechanism, if a single bean is further qualified with specific @Named name, I do not feel well, if people are going to use this annotation as a qualifying one like @Named("stage_test") on multiple beans. The EL namespace gets polluted with unresolvable names and developers become potentially confused by the ambiguous usage of the annotation. In brief: Identifiers (like EL names or Spring bean IDs) does not feel like being qualifiers (e.g. @Asynchronous) from my point of view. br, Sven