I don't want to get into another standards war. The marketplace is really the place for competition. I think it was a political move, literally. The members of the Open Group are allied with the PC platform, which makes any non-PC implementation of the ActiveX specification a distant thought. Any other implementation would have to make performance or functional concessions to the spec.
Standardization can be good or bad.
ActiveX is not a bad technology per se, its just that it truly can only run in a Windows architecture. And that is anathema to the philosophy of the Net. In the absence of strong, savvy software competitors, Microsoft has an abysmal record as far as open standards are concerned. They can't restrain themselves from coopting standards to fit their own short-term strategic advantage. While Microsoft bashes Java for security holes, the proposed alternative, ActiveX, has no built-in security.