| Microsoft'sComponent Object Model. The ideais good, based around the concept of being able to create an object in any language with a language independant definition, and to let several of these objects work together.
Unfortuantly, in traditional style Microsoft forgot to account for a few small things, such as everything but polymorphism. They noticed this and tacked on late binding, distributed execution, system independant activation, persistance and a few other items. | 
