A lot of this line of work also originated from efforts to solve problems in COM, which was becoming central to Microsoft's approach to platforms. The idea was

A lot of this line of work also originated from efforts to solve problems in COM, which was becoming central to Microsoft's approach to platforms. The idea was to make it easier to produce objects in different languages and then let them interoperate at runtime. In that regard, Microsoft's notion of a common runtime environment for objects was a natural follow on to COM's concept of objects abstracted behind interfaces. There was also a great deal of confusion around the way Microsoft originally introduced COM. When Windows 3.1 came out, one of its marquee features was something called OLE 1.0 - Object Linking and Embedding. This was a composite document approach built on an early technology called DDE, Dynamic Data Exchange. (Which was brittle, and based on Windows messaging.) A few years later, they introduced OLE 2.0, which added a bunch of features, but mainly completely replaced DDE with COM. For a while, there was a lot of conflation of COM as something OLE 2.0 specific.