alt Hacker NewsCOM is pretty much alive, it is the main delivery mechanism for new Windows APIs since Windows vista, and in the context of your remark powers UI Automation framework.
I have a DDE book somewhere, with endless pages of C boilerplate to exchange a couple of values between two applications on Windows 3.x.
I'm not sure new windows APIs use COM as people remember it. Nowadays they are written against WinRT, which is arguably an evolution of COM.