Re:COM, CORBA, Objective-C (Score 1)

Agreed. I build enterprise applications around well-understood and widely-adopted standards like SOA, ReST, SOAP, XML, etc. Without a well-thought-out set of standards and interfaces the components of any system end up tightly coupled; fragility goes up and interoperability goes down as systems grow and age. It doesn't matter if the system is a microwave oven OS or an n-tier e-commerce application; good design and universal buy-in to the design goals are important. In the early days of open source Java framework development (I pitched in on several Apache projects) there was a definite "maverick" or "cowboy" attitude afoot, but we eventually came to the realization that if we continued to build marginally usable (though innovative and well-intentioned) stuff, only a curious and determined few would get any benefit from it. The Linux desktop design/developer community will have to come to this same realization if Linux is to be anything but a curiosity; I really hope they do, and soon. I've used Linux exclusively on the desktop since 2007. I often marvel at its versatility, but 10 minutes later it makes me want to poke jagged bamboo sticks into my eyes when I ask it to do something ordinary that its creators failed to anticipate and correctly implement.