The performance of COM is incredible. Agreed, the performance of COM is pretty good in-process, and can even be extended to allow other applications to script your objects (via the IDispatch interface). So it's a pretty versatile technology, but it seems to be yesterdays' news after .net came out.

To experience DCOM in your windows box now is pretty easy. Simply: Start -> Run -> 'mmc'

File -> Add Remove Snapin

Add 'component Services'

And enjoy the spinning COM+ balls to see running COM servers.

It's all still there.