Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It was magical that dropping a telephony component into a form enabled the form to make phone calls the magic of COM[0]! But when it crashed it crashed hard. And the underlying programming model (beyond just using premade ones) are a bit hard to grok and fraught with footguns that shoot not only yourself, but the OS as well. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model
And COM/OLE/ActiveX components (whatever Microsoft fancied calling them that year) could have been used just as easily from Delphi. And you don't even need COM. You could do the same things today with RAD components in, say, Java. But it's just no longer a fad. Programmers nowadays don't think that dragging a component that makes phone calls and linking it to a button. Nowadays, they would just write "npm install tel…
It's a grandiose vision. It just didnt work out because of how complicated it is in practise to implement the COM interface(s), and not enough apps did it anyway.
It is slightly different from a library, since that library would have to be useable from your language (or have some sort of FFI mechanism).