I was a Windows desktop application developer during the 90's, so I've done COM development, with VB, Delphi and a tiny bit of C, so I know what you mean. I wo

I was a Windows desktop application developer during the 90's, so I've done COM development, with VB, Delphi and a tiny bit of C, so I know what you mean. I would say that COM is more special case and embeddable, rather than general purpose and composable? And this is all on the developer side, rather than the user side too. If the OS and applications had just been shipped as pre-packaged collections of COM objects - which you could reuse and remix into new tools and applications, with writing piles of code, then yeah. It was close for a while, but never got all the way to userland, sadly.