We did originally make Variant public, but we ended up not having a need
for it.  It confused people a bit too much.  We're in a simpler world right
now that users can't confuse themselves over too much - Object is the root
of our inheritance hierarchy, not Variant.  Most of the interesting
functionality for converting between types became the IConvertible
interface, which all of our base data types implement.  And yes, it only
exists for Interop implementation reasons.

Brian Grunkemeyer
MS Base Class Library team
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