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Later in that article I posted on earlier is this gem:

While CORBA attempted to use a similar strategy, its complexity required major investment by platform vendors, which limited its scope. The simplicity of XML-based protocols significantly lowers the barrier to implementation, ensuring their greater ubiquity. By encoding remote method invocation requests as XML, they avoid interoperability problems caused by platform specific remote procedure call encoding and argument marshalling. Also, by obtaining broad industry agreement on standards, they have designed platform interoperability in from the beginning.

Ok, let me pull out the 40 ton cluestick and explain something to the author - the various XML mechanisms for interop (SOAP, XML-RPC, etc) are no simpler than CORBA. I've worked with both, and - in fact - the current WS* developments look astoundingly like the process the OMG used in the 90's for CORBA. It's all the same stuff, this time using text instead of binary. You want to secret to XML's success? It's not simplicity - it's port 80. To get a CORBA service working between 2 entities, I have to get security personnel all around to agree to open specific ports. The XML protocols take a pass on that by using HTTP as their transport mechanism.

XML is not simpler, and anyone who tells you it is selling something.