Java EE has been an extremely successful platform. The Java Community Process (JCP) has been the steward of over 20 compatible implementations over its nearly 20 year history, resulting in a $4B industry. However, Oracle management of Java EE (unintentional or not) stalled innovations and while other standards have developed, the Java community worldwide, and CIOs at all major enterprises desired an open standard for Java within their enterprise.
In its early stages, J2EE grew somewhat quickly between J2EE 1.2 up to J2EE 1.4 as the platform needed to address the immediate needs of the enterprise. Beginning with Java EE 5 in May 2006, the pace began to slow as the platform began to mature, and it was 3 years and 6 months between releases. After Java EE 7, which was released on June 12, 2013, there has been a long delay in its development. Java EE 8 was formally launched in September of 2014 at JavaOne, where Oracle announced that it would be completed by JavaOne 2016. But then on June 2015, Oracle updated its release date to the first half of 2017. And again, at JavaOne 2016 (September), Oracle revised the Java EE 8 release date to the end of 2017. Java EE 8 was finally released on September 21, 2017 at JavaOne.
Java EE has been following the slower release cadence that a standards organization typically reflects. A standards-based release cadence by design does not address rapid innovations. And while this was occurring, the Digital Economy happened, which brought about the popularity and rising use of cloud, containers, agile methodologies, DevOps, continuous integration and continuous delivery, microservices, API management, and open source projects (Red Hat has been successful in delivering many of these solutions to the marketplace). The slowdown in Java EE releases (and maturity) opened the door to competing technologies that were able to fulfill the needs and requirements of Digital Businesses, such as Spring, Node.js, for example. In addition, many vendors, e.g. Red Hat and IBM, started innovating with enterprise Java microservices based on a subset of Java EE and decided to collaborate in the open, potentially providing a wider effort upstream. This culminated in the announcement of Eclipse MicroProfile in June 2016 by many vendors, Java champions, Java User Groups, and corporations.
Since MicroProfile was announced on June 27, 2016 at DevNation, a lot has happened. MicroProfile v 1.0 was released on September 19, 2016. Its implementation interoperability was demonstrated on November 2016 at Devoxx Belgium, where Red Hat, IBM, Tomitribe, and Payara demonstrated a unified web application (known as "The Conference Application") with underlying microservices which had been developed separately by each vendor using MicroProfile. In addition, MicroProfile became part of the Eclipse Foundation as an incubation project on December 14, 2016. New members have joined the MicroProfile project, including SOUJava, Hazelcast, Fujitsu, Hammock, kumuluzEE, Oracle, Lightbend, and Microsoft. The complete list of members can be found here.