Imagined from the same fold as COM (which you are likely talking about) was CORBA, an international standard for "object" interoperability.

Guess what came out of that?

It's one of those systems that's perfect (as in perfectly abstracting away everything) but notoriously and impractically complex. COM is only slightly less so.

The downfall of all the object-oriented approaches is that we don't really think about objects, but instead of actions ("functions") we perform, which is much simpler as well. Basically, you don't see bread and say bread->eat() (or at least your doctor will tell you not to :)) but instead look for something to eat() and then stick bread in it once you find it (eat(bread)).