Some philosophy for a change. What constitutes the innate characteristics of an object? This question is not as simple as it sounds. Let me give an example: if you consider a wooden chair, what would you say are its innate characteristics? Is it its colour, shape, texture, size or composition?

Whichever of these attributes you choose, the fact is that all of them are properties of our interaction with the chair. We perceive it as red because we shine a light on it and red light is reflected back at us. We feel its texture as smooth because we run our fingers over its surface and encounter no resistance. We say it is a big chair because we find that there is a lot of room left when we sit on it.

You get the idea. The bottom line is that we have no way of knowing 'ultimate reality', as it were, through our five senses.

I think this is what the architects at Microsoft had in mind when they came up with the idea of using interfaces as the primary programming constructs for COM.