(DCOM) Microsoft's extension of their Component Object Model (COM) to support objects distributed across a network. DCOM has been submitted to the IETF as a draft standard. Since 1996, it has been part of Windows NT and is also available for Windows 95. Unlike CORBA, which runs on many operating systems, DCOM is currently (Dec 1997) only implemented by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and by Software AG, under the name "EntireX", for Unix and IBM mainframes. DCOM serves the same purpose as IBM's DSOM protocol. DCOM is broken because it's an object model that has no provisions for inheritance, one of the major reasons for object oriented programming in the first place.