Microsoft Corp last week threw in the towel on further resistance to the Object Management Group’s Corba Common Object Request Broker Architecture standard, and publicly acknowledged – in the person of Paul Gross, vice-president of its Internet Tools Division – that there has to be interoperability between the Corba-IIOP Internet Inter-ORB Protocol and its own DCOM Distributed Common Object Model. At Object World in Boston last week, Microsoft endorsed Hewlett-Packard Co’s recent submission to Part B of the Object Group’s long-standing, long-fought COM- to-Corba interoperability request for proposal. Getting Microsoft to finally come out of the closet and do something is a victory for the Object Group, at least it thinks so. The Hewlett-Packard Microsoft proposal now has to face off against the rival proposal submitted by Expersoft Inc, ICL-Fujitsu Ltd, Genesis Development Corp, Iona Technologies Ltd, Novell Inc, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, Visigenic Software Inc and Visual Edge Software Inc. The Object Group is famous for the horse trading that goes on during these sieges, and the sides have until the next meeting in Italy this May to come to terms or round of wrangling. The Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft joint submission offers either DCOM or IIOP, which would make it appear to be a sensible start to another compromise. However, it is also heavily based on the Open Group’s DCE Distributed Computing Environment, which is considered a failure in many quarters.
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