>It's always been surprising to me that other platforms didn't take advantage of the COM hosting features that Windows essentially provided to integrate with other tools - the APIs have always been public but Microsoft seems to be the only company that was using it. Interop is always a benefit to the vendors IMHO who get uptake, so it's baffling that this wasn't taken advantage of more (especially back in the day when desktop still really mattered).
>
>+++ Rick ---

I only found one application for COM in all my years of desktop programming, and it was a weird one.

This client had a label printer running off a serial port on machine A and wanted to print labels on that printer from machine B.
At that time there was no way to share a serial port, so I wrote a DCOM app running on Machine A that was accessed by machine B.

I got it to run, but the setup process was klunky. That might be why it wasn't more popular.