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.
© ACM, 2006. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in ACM Queue Magazine (Vol 4, Issue 5, June 2006).