After working with Distributed COM, I'd go as far as to say that people building DCOM software were doing microservices, way before that term was known or popular - microservices at much finer granularity (per object), and all the bells&whistles people make startups off today - like load balancing, service discovery, strong auth, etc. - were already built into the platform and properly integrated.
Alas, it was ahead of its time; the legacy of C makes it hard to work with.
Eh, but stateful and synchronous and chatty. I don't think DCOM has too many good ideas, beyond what it shares with CORBA - mostly, an IDL. It's good to have an IDL if you're going to be serious about heterogeneous implementations.
Alas, it was ahead of its time; the legacy of C makes it hard to work with.