Will a dominant standard for object-oriented system development emerge?

The lack of a dominant object oriented (OO) standard has been a hindrance to the OO paradigm´s successful adoption on a large scale. Currently, within different versions of OO methodologies, various OO concepts can exist under different names and interpretations. While recently there have been some attempts to standardise OO systems development, until now, no standard has emerged as the dominant standard in practice. Our objective is to assess benefits of a dominant standard, and to investigate strengths and weaknesses of the current approaches towards standardisation. Based on this investigation, we outline how these different standardisation approaches can contribute toward the emergence of a dominant standard. We conclude that a metamodelling approach, combined with argumentation and ontology when necessary, has the best chance to achieve the goal that, to quote Snyder (1993), “those applying OO technology will one day speak the same language”