You have a good imagination. I worked on COM at Microsoft. We had a project to add managed run-time capabilities to COM. This was ~'96. Internally we thought

You have a good imagination. I worked on COM at Microsoft. We had a project to add managed run-time capabilities to COM. This was ~'96. Internally we thought of the Component Object Model that shipped as part of OLE as "COM version 1". The version that supported distributed capabilities (aka DCOM) as "COM version 2". When we started working on adding managed runtime support we started talking about "COM 3". But that talk stopped quickly when I tried to create a directory named COM3 for some specs. Creating the directory wasn't a problem. But putting anything in it or deleting was. We quickly settled on the name "COR" for Component Object Runtime instead. We actually released the COR at the '96 (I think) PDC as an alpha. But it never actually shipped because .NET won the internal battle (full IL based managed runtime to replace COM vs. incrementally adding garbage collection and other managed capabilites to COM ala Objective-C). Later on, as the MS Transaction Server group was merged with the COM team, the name COM+ was invented to cover "DCOM + Transaction Server + MSMQ". This led to the fabled Project42 which I have chosen to forget.