Object Wave

Write once, run everywhere — then enterprise forever. Still the backbone of serious backend estates.

Microsoft's managed stack grew up — cross-platform, open source, and still dominant in enterprise Windows shops.

Customize the ERP until upgrades are impossible. The enterprise tax that keeps consultants in villas.

$ ABAP extensions and bespoke modules that made every upgrade a multi-year program. Millions spent aligning ERP to process instead of process to ERP.

JVM language with functional teeth. Spark and Kafka culture kept it relevant long after the Twitter hype cooled.

Let it crash, supervision trees, and nine-nines uptime. The telecom substrate that outlived every "modern" backend pitch.

Drag-and-drop business logic that powered SMB back offices worldwide. Microsoft killed it; the apps refused to die.

EJB-heavy stacks taught a generation that XML config was architecture. Spring and lighter runtimes absorbed the survivors.

Spec first, code later. Agile didn't kill planning — it killed pretending the Gantt chart was reality.

RAD Windows client development before .NET. Still runs vertical-market apps whose source lives on a burned CD.

Language-agnostic distributed objects. Complexity scaled faster than value for most shops.

$ Enterprises spent years on IDL, ORBs, and vendor lock-in for distributed objects that SOAP and REST later made look quaint — after the invoices cleared.

When every wiring decision lived in 4,000-line XML files. Configuration became a second programming language nobody wanted.

Diagrams as deliverables. Useful as a sketch tool; catastrophic when treated as source of truth.