Writing in the March issue of Unix World’s Open Computing, Seybold Group industry watcher Michael Goulde comments that the Unix industry overreacted to the perceived threat from Windows NT and mistakenly opted for a tactical approach – the Common Open Software Environment and Common Desktop Environment – when it should have defended itself strategically by putting all its resources and energy behind accelerating efforts at CORBA 2 [the second generation of the Object Management Group’s Common Object Request Broker Arcitecture], object request broker interoperability, and tools for distributed object-oriented applications development. That approach would have put Unix way ahead of Microsoft before Cairo ever rolled out. Now he claims that it is likely that the object-oriented architectures for Unix will never be able to do more than play catch-up with the Microsoft Corp-Digital Equipment Corp Common Object Model.
