I see what you mean that COM and Corba tried to unify programming across language boundaries. But they were not a low-level ABI type thing. They explicitly pu

I see what you mean that COM and Corba tried to unify programming across language boundaries. But they were not a low-level ABI type thing. They explicitly pushed a particular idea of what objects are and what they are for. In any case, judged by the standard of becoming a universal ABI, they were also designed to "fail" in the sense that MS wasn't going too sit around and standardise it across operating systems, while the CORBA was a (feeble) response from the Unix world that no one expected would take off on Windows.