As chief scientist at a start up company in the 90's I had to occasionally attend standardization meetings to protect our products. This included some of the ve

As chief scientist at a start up company in the 90's I had to occasionally attend standardization meetings to protect our products. This included some of the very early CORBA meetings. Without participating, we risked being non-compiant with evolving standards in our space and so I had to attend and keep up with the directions things were going. Companies like DEC, HP, and IBM might send five or six people to the important meetings and consequently it was easier for them to influence the direction of standards in a way that favored the architectures of their products. While I met a few, very bright, systems architects actually interested in coming up with a design that would provide the benefits of industry-wide standards, many of the participants couldn't grasp good design or simply acted in a partisan way for the sole good of their own company. What struck me was that there were mostly "goers" not "doers" attending these meetings. The organizations real developers and architects were busy working on real products, too busy to attend the excruciating standards meetings. The goers on the other hand might be from the "planning" organizations in these large companies. These planners often had very little background as developers and little insight into realistic requirements. At the CORBA meetings, powerful members couldn't agree on the lowest levels of the protocol. Would it run over UDP? or TCP? what about IP vs Token Ring vs OSI networking architectures. At a slightly higher level some companies had their own, completely incompatible, RPC, data marshaling, and security efforts well under way and they simply wouldn't sign off on any standardization below the Application or Presentation layers of the protocol. This was crazy; CORBA was burdened with an architecture requiring standardization at the application layer between products that couldn't actually communicate with each other. Hopelessly deadlocked at the most fundamental communication levels, the key people involved in CORBA needed progress to keep CORBA alive, so CORBA moved forward on standardization of things like nested distributed transactions--trying to run before they could walk.