Basically, the Component Object battle was to be the story of the 90's:
Cairo vs. Taligent vs. NeXTSTEP. The battle will still be joined in this
decade, it just has a dramatically different face...
To date, developers have been licensing technologies
such as ActiveX, Component Object Model (COM), and Distributed COM
from Microsoft.
On July 31, Microsoft said it would hold a meeting of "stakeholders"
in August to determine what is the best way to proceed with turning
ActiveX into an independent standard. Last week, however, Microsoft
backed down from its commitment to an August event and said the first
meeting of stakeholders would be delayed at least a month or more.