Not really. COM/OLE is a different paradigm, their answer to an infamous vaporware called Taligent/OpenDoc that bankrupted many developers. Microsoft was sort of stuck with that security nightmare though
"COM" by itself is a rather broad umbrella. What you're describing seems to be OLE Automation. That's the one that has type libraries (which you need for discoverability).
And then Active Scripting was supposed to be how you'd script those endpoints...
