Would really like to know what's your theory on why component based software failed in those cases and if Web Components learned/solved those problems.
Furthermore, making components from multiple independent vendors interact seamlessly is just an incredibly complex problem. The web is probably the most successful decentralized system, and this is because the common integration point which all must support is very very simple: URL's and links.
You probably could augment your way up to something that would work more like OpenDoc without too much hassle in principle, but it'd be a lot of work in practice.