It also seems to combine the worst of both platforms: Apps. Is there any OSDEV work that goes towards a more integrated, component-based architecture? As sad as it seems, Unix tools & pipes seems to be the most successful and enduring attempt in that direction. Systems doing that on a language basis seem mostly dead (Lisps, Smalltalks, Oberons), component architecture isn't doing much (OpenDoc as the prime example, C…
Component architecture is everywhere on the desktops, just not on those using UNIX text terminals. COM has been the underlying driving technology of Windows since Vista, where the Windows team took the Longhorn .NET ideas and redid them with COM, since then we got COM improved as WinRT/UWP. Which despite the common mix with the store (blame marketing teams), is what to this day most Windows 10 APIs make use of, and n…
COM and OLE, which is based on COM, have been a core part of the Windows shell since at least Windows 95/NT 4.0/IE 4.
You can see this in the registry where shell extensions are simply registered OLE Components, using OLE Activation to to register themselves as toolbars, folder views, context menus and additional commands in context menus.
If you are referring to drivers or core OS concepts at a lower level, you may be right, but DirectX and class drivers were already using COM in places before Vista.
COM is a standard vtable implementing a single core interface, called IUnknown which provides a method of reference counting as well as a way to look up implementaions of specific other interfaces from a given pointer. These interfaces dervive from that base, so they can always be cast as IUnknown.
The rest builds on this base.
source: Inside OLE and Inside Windows 95
https://books.google.com/books/about/Inside_OLE.html?id=adpw...
https://www.bookdepository.com/Inside-Windows-95-Deluxe-Edit...
Edit: saw the reply below, the specific Longhorn components only expanded the scope of what is extensible to include searchable/virtual/indexed filesystem extensions and few other places, based on the innovative concepts in Longhorn. My reading of your comment originally was that Vista was a departure from what came before, though it appears that it may have been intended to say it was more of a return to the simpler COM.