If you are an OSS guy and would never dream of touching things like COM with a ten-foot barge pole, I would urge you to still read Chapter 1 of Essential COM. Don Box starts off with the pre-COM attempts to achieve interoperability and flexibility in a distributed, OO computing environment and takes you through the various options at hand. He shows how each option improves on the earlier one, and you are impressed by the strength of his arguments. You reach the end of the chapter, and this line stares you in the face: "In short, we have just engineered the Component Object Model." The first thought that strikes you is "WTF?!", followed closely by the blasphemous thought that may be the guys at Redmond aren't so dumb, after all :-)