Microsoft shipped a broken DCOM CD-ROM and no-one noticed

Yea, a lot of people are used to large vendors over promising on tech that doesn't work. As soon as they find issues with it, they don't fiddle with it to make it work, they move on to something else that seems more stable.

In 1996 I was weary of anything Microsoft made, let alone something that wouldn't even compile. The fact that they distributed a CD with missing files which made it 100% defective re-affirms why people were weary of their products. They didn't even bother doing ANY testing of how it was distributed.

This sounds likely. If I were a dev receiving this, as soon as I found out that I couldn't build anything or there were files missing, I'd have just roundfiled the disk and never give it a second thought, unless the tool were mission-critical for something.