You joke, but I started with Win32 programming then later moved to MacOSX and the COM/Objective-C link is pretty clear.
My guess is that a team at Microsoft in the 90s saw the need for a cross-process runtime object system, saw Objective-C and thought to themselves "Hey, this Objective-C is pretty useful but it doesn't suck enough to be part of Win32. Lets fix that - GUIDs, GUIDs for everyone!."
There's an amusing video on youtube where Steve Jobs is demoing remote Objects on NextStep and (I think) Openstep on Windows, and having a laugh at MS since Next managed to get remote Objects working before MS got their Remote OLE (aka DCOM) working. Steve calls it Doh'LE.
The only different thing that COM had was support for scripting the objects via IDispatch, but that was such a pain (VARIANTS !) that only those really needing it bothered.
MS were also very proud of their MTS where an on the fly proxy object was created, but even that was inspired by Remote objects.
However they really jumped the shark when they made it possible to create COM objects from Visual Basic - the endless grief caused whenever a VB developer decided to change any parameters on the interface and caused all GUIDs to be regenerated and a big fat binary with all revisions of the code. They then created a tool to strip that all down to just the last version, thereby totally removing any backward compatibility - which then caused other random components to fail.
