I just finished reading O'Reilly's ".NET Framework Essentials", printed in 2001. It's a good overview of the first release of Microsoft's .NET platform.
The authors comment on Microsoft's focus on distributed development. Looking back, we can see that distributed development did not occur. The idea that .NET was a better DCOM didn't take hold with developers.
Yet the book highlights the success that Microsoft has achieved. The .NET platform is much easier to use than the previous mix of DLL, VBX, OLE, COM, DCOM, ATL, DAO, ADO, and what-have-you components. The object framework is reasonably consistent and provides a greater degree of interoperability for Windows development. (Not with much outside of Windows, perhaps, but better interoperability within Windows.)
Granted, Microsoft invented very little in .NET. They took ideas from Java and other platforms. They cannot be lauded for innovation, but we can appreciate the implementation. Microsoft made development in Windows a lot saner. (And possibly saved their company. Without .NET and C#, Microsoft would be losing ground to Java, Perl, Python, and Ruby, languages with run on multiple platforms.)
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