[pjmlp]

COM is the main way Windows APIs are exposed since Windows Vista, as the .NET ideas for Longhorn were rebooted as COM.

While plain old bare bones Win32 APIs are still coming up in every release, they aren't the main ones.

Also COM as concept wasn't something designed by Microsoft, it rather build up on the ideas of what Sun, IBM and co were doing with distributed objects protocols.

It is no coincidence that COM IDL language is based on DCE RPC.