In the 90's COM didn't make a lot of sense to me because I never needed it. Then, around 2001, I needed it to solve some problems and I finally invested the time to figure it out. It's actually pretty neat as long as it isn't in your web browser (ActiveX).

Around that time I too thought I was seeing the future - component-based development that's language and platform agnostic.

UWP/WinRT is basically an improved COM, it never went away, rather took over most of the modern Windows APIs since XP.

Pity that WinDev keeps producing the same tools as back in MDIL 1.0 days though, the only good tool C++/CX, got killed by them.

At least it's possible to write COM in a measurable time. I did it in C++ although that was a pain. It became much easier in .NET.

CORBA - I did not even finish reading "Introduction to CORBA". A book of 500+ pages.