This sentence shows a trap most technical people keep following into: "These arguments cannot fully account for CORBA’s loss of popularity, however. After all,

This sentence shows a trap most technical people keep following into: "These arguments cannot fully account for CORBA’s loss of popularity, however. After all, if the technology had been as compelling as was originally envisaged, it is unlikely that customers would have dropped it in favor of alternatives." Wrong. Those arguments more than explain the failure. CORBA, like most technology, doesn't succeed or fail because of how "compelling" or repulsive it was. People use terrible technology all the time. Major applications are written in terrible technology. Business make huge amounts of money off terrible technology. Great technology is skipped all the time. As engineers we care about this kind of thing. The problem is that, the vast majority of people in a business don't give a shit what technology stack you use. Technology does not exist in a bubble, where it lives or dies in some kind of hippy meritocracy. Technology exists in the real world where other factors tend to dominate far more than we think they should. This is also why when engineers start companies, they quickly learn that 90% of running a business has nothing to do with technology or development.