,TomboRombo wrote

Bad ideas usually go away but not the good ones.  (I never thought COM and ActiveX was a good idea and they have faded).

Actually, I believe COM was a good idea, but Microsoft didn't put the effort into making it a first-class platform. COM hasn't faded at all, it's an important part of Windows (many APIs are exposed only through COM, for example, like DirectShow).

ActiveX is just the next iteration of OLE for controls and widgets. It's still used a lot (Flash and Java for IE, for example), but Microsoft doesn't market it the way they used to.