[derriz]

The article doesn't spend enough time on the fact that actual _interoperability_ didn't actually come to CORBA until it was already past its peak. So a key feature of the technology never really worked.

I worked at a CORBA vender for a year or two in the 1990s and even interoperability between languages, platforms and versions OF OUR OWN CORBA implementation was barely supported and down to luck more than anything else.

Note that CORBA existed as a spec for years before actually specifying an actual wire protocol (IIOP) which you'd imagine would be a fairly fundamental part of any distributed tech which had the goal of offering interoperability. And even years after IIOP appeared, getting CORBA to work between vendors' products was basically impossible.

"Interoperability" in effect meant buying 100% into a single vendor's offering and paying a load of money to consultants to manage version upgrades, getting fixes for "niche" platforms, etc. CORBA's notion of "interoperability" was more along the lines of the way old IBM offered "interoperability" between their different mainframes and minis, and not in the way understood today which is vendor neutral and open.

Another poster says that IONA (one of the biggest vendors) believed that they were going to topple Microsoft. In my opinion, it was actually IBM and the old "big vendor" model where they saw their future. They started offering (mostly broken) Transaction Managers, Service Discover agents, a Message Broker, etc. - as what they hoped would be alternatives to the then dominant big-enterprise tech like CICS/MQ. They imagined a future for big enterprises based around C++/CORBA replacing COBOL/CICS/MQ.