COM can be said to be overly complicated (at least not as bad a CORBA). I think WinMD is a step in the right direction, but both COM and WinMD are userland cons

COM can be said to be overly complicated (at least not as bad a CORBA). I think WinMD is a step in the right direction, but both COM and WinMD are userland constructs and neither particularly pervade the OS (e.g. you can't pipe COM objects)