The Rise and Fall of CORBA

Over the span of a few years, CORBA moved from being a successful middleware that was hailed as the Internet's next-generation e-commerce infrastructure to being an obscure niche technology that is all but forgotten. This rapid decline is surprising. How can a technology that was produced by the world's largest software consortium fall from grace so quickly? Many of the reasons are technical: poor architecture, complex APIs, and lack of essential features all contributed to CORBA's downfall. However, such technical shortcomings are a symptom rather than a cause. Ultimately, CORBA failed because its standardization process virtually guarantees poor technical quality. Seeing that other standards consortia use a process that is very similar, this does not bode well for the viability of other technologies produced in this fashion.