Time in the software market

I was cleaning up the basement and found this June 1998 magazine. It reads "Inside COM: Microsoft's Bold Long-Term Strategy". The .NET Framework 1.0 was released 5/1/2002. This time this long-term "strategy" lasted 4 years. (What's a strategy anyways?) I guess there was nothing bad with COM. It served its purpose at the time. Ok, it was a bit complicated, all that interoperability stuff and those threading models and those remote objects. I suppose some times software people like to complicate things a bit too much. Thank havens there's always marketing to disguise it as something easy. The problem is that in this process the public receives a bad education and ends up with extreme expectations (high and low).