[HN Gopher] Why did OpenDoc fail, and then fail 3 more times?
___________________________________________________________________
Why did OpenDoc fail, and then fail 3 more times?
Author : marianoguerra
Score : 77 points
Date : 2021-05-10 14:17 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (instadeq.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (instadeq.com)
| dunham wrote:
| It's been decades since I looked at it, but I remember Andrew
| User Interface System being another attempt at this.
|
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~AUIS/
| tobr wrote:
| Is it fair to compare OpenDoc with something like Notion? It has
| the same concept of being able to construct documents from many
| smaller relatively independent parts, except of course that the
| parts are all created by the same company.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| I think Notion is missing the ability of its documents being
| embeddable outside of its app.
| veidr wrote:
| No, because the entire point of OpenDoc was that the parts
| could be created by different entities.
| jbandela1 wrote:
| I think the big reason OpenDoc failed is because it was
| completely steamrolled by Microsoft OLE 2.
|
| These are complicated enough APIs that a developer is typically
| going to only implement one.
|
| To better understand, it helps to go back in time when this was
| going on.
|
| This was the early 90's, and Microsoft Windows was the dominant
| OS. In addition, Microsoft Office was also becoming the dominant
| office software.
|
| Microsoft put a lot of it's energy behind OLE 2. Office supported
| it. If you wanted your application to be certified for Windows
| 95, you needed to support OLE 2. OLE 2 was pushed at all the
| Microsoft Developer conferences. Every book and magazine about
| Windows development pushed OLE 2. Microsoft's Visual C++ MFC
| framework supported OLE 2, and in fact, their Scribble tutorial
| included a section on implementing OLE 2. Visual Basic supported
| OLE 2, and in fact their custom controls were OLE 2 objects.
|
| Thus if you supported OLE 2, you had a ton of documentation,
| tooling, libraries, dev environments that supported it. You could
| get Windows 95 application certification. You would be able to
| embed Office documents in your application, or have Office embed
| your documents in Office. IIRC, Visio started out as an
| independent application that had great OLE 2 support and was
| eventually acquired by Microsoft. And you could tell that OLE 2
| was a huge priority for Microsoft. In fact, the rumored next
| generation successor to Windows 95 and Windows NT, Cairo was
| supposed to be built on OLE 2 from the ground up. (Cairo never
| materialized).
|
| On the other hand you had OpenDoc, which did not have nearly as
| big of a market. It was not the priority for any of the companies
| pushing it. Unlike with Microsoft Office and OLE 2, there wasn't
| a halo product that showed off the user benefits of OpenDoc.
| There wasn't nearly the documentation and tooling and libraries
| for OpenDoc.
|
| Given all that, I don't consider it surprising that OpenDoc
| failed.
| pvg wrote:
| _I think the big reason OpenDoc failed is because it was
| completely steamrolled by Microsoft OLE 2_
|
| For that to be true, OpenDoc had to first be deployed and
| successful _somewhere_ so OLE 2 could be said to have competed
| with it and to have won. Microsoft 's office apps crushed
| Apple's office apps in the marketplace, etc. OLE 2 never really
| competed with OpenDoc, though, because no working (in any
| practical sense) OpenDoc anything ever shipped with MacOS. All
| the OLE 2 context seems pretty orthogonal, OpenDoc didn't even
| 'win' within the Apple platform.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > because no working (in any practical sense) OpenDoc
| anything ever shipped with MacOS
|
| Well, beyond that -- almost no OpenDoc software shipped _at
| all_. The first significant release was Apple 's CyberDog web
| browser in 1996, and the OpenDoc project was cancelled in
| 1997.
|
| Mac OS never really embraced OpenDoc wholeheartedly, either.
| It wasn't included in the default install of Mac OS, so most
| users were never exposed to it.
| pvg wrote:
| Yes, I was mostly just being nice to OpenDoc.
| overgard wrote:
| I was pretty young at the time, but I can't really remember
| much of a use for OLE outside of Visual Basic? (Which granted,
| was Big). Maybe databases also?
| skissane wrote:
| People used it so you could stick an Excel spreadsheet inside
| a Word document.
|
| People also used it to attach attach Word/Excel/Powerpoint
| documents to emails as OLE objects, which would be stored in
| TNEF format. This worked fine within a local network when
| everyone was running Outlook and Exchange, but caused
| problems when people started sending emails out over the
| Internet (remember winmail.dat files?). More recent versions
| of Outlook+Exchange prefer to just use MIME.
| mschaef wrote:
| > I think the big reason OpenDoc failed is because it was
| completely steamrolled by Microsoft OLE 2.
|
| I think the bigger reason may be this, from the original
| article:
|
| > Most folks at Claris, Apple's application group, didn't want
| it at all, seeing it as an enabler for competition to Claris's
| office suite product, ClarisWorks.
|
| The trouble with composite documents is that it goes against
| the market's tendency to accrete power to the incumbent.
|
| * If you're WRITING document software, the composite document
| model adds a bunch of development complexity for (mainly) the
| purpose of opening doors for your competitors to eat away at
| your lock in. From a marketing perspective, If I'm writing
| document software I'd probably much rather you use _my_
| spreadsheet than whatever spreadsheet you want. From a support
| perspective, it's easier if I own the code on both sides of an
| embedding. From a development perspective, it's easier to add
| more differentiated features if I don't have to force
| everything through a common document embedding model, etc.
|
| * If you're USING document prep software, the composite
| document model adds complexity to the way you install and buy
| software, the UX for the software, and then what you can do
| with the documents you create with your carefully curated
| software suite.
|
| There are ways that all of this can be addressed from a
| technical perspective, but the end reality is that the costs
| are too high and the return too limited to be useful.
|
| (As you point out, OLE2 has seen a lot of market acceptance,
| but a lot of that comes in the context of MS Office. Despite
| the availability of embedding technology within OLE2, The
| market didn't gravitate to hand-curated sets of best-of-breed
| office software. The market gravitated to MS Office with
| specific add ons for specific use cases. Even then, in settings
| where not everybody had those add on packages, there was a
| tendency to push documents to fit into whatever stock MS Office
| would support.)
| jbandela1 wrote:
| > The market didn't gravitate to hand-curated sets of best-
| of-breed office software
|
| By this time, in terms of software for Windows, the programs
| that came with Microsoft Office were best of breed (or else
| pretty close).
|
| From In Search of Stupidity by Merril Chapman:
|
| >The only problem with this theory was that the competition
| didn't have the best-of-breed products; Microsoft did. Though
| Quattro was always well rated by the press and usually beat
| Lotus 1-2-3 in head-to-head competitions, it almost
| invariably was an also-ran to the top-ranked product,
| Microsoft Excel. WordPerfect's botched release of its first
| Windows-based word processor had landed the one-time ruler of
| the category in third place. First and second places were
| usually fought over by Microsoft Word and Lotus's AmiPro.
| Microsoft PowerPoint and Lotus Freelance usually struggled
| for the business presentation graphics crown, but the
| spreadsheet and word-processing elements were the most
| important factors in a buyer's decision. Advantage:
| Microsoft.
|
| >Both Borland and WordPerfect attempted to fight back with
| competing office suites assembled from each other's
| respective products (with SPC's faded Harvard Graphics thrown
| into the mix), but they were unsuccessful. Not surprisingly,
| the new suites lacked the integration of Microsoft Office,
| but more important, they were bundles of second- and third-
| class programs competing against top-ranked contenders. Lotus
| SmartSuite faced a similar problem. Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows
| never placed higher than second in competitive face-offs and
| usually came in third place (a shocking comedown for the one-
| time category leader). AmiPro sometimes outplaced Microsoft
| Word, but Lotus was, after all, the spreadsheet company.
| Freelance usually placed second to PowerPoint in reviews, and
| the suite's database, Approach, although a decent product,
| wasn't well known and brought little extra credibility to the
| package.
| lurkerasdfh8 wrote:
| So both Microsoft and Apple, steamrolled the project with the
| money they were making by keeping users hostage.
| mschaef wrote:
| At the time it happened, I'd have been sympathetic to that
| phrasing. In the couple decades then, I'm grown much more
| sanguine about it.
|
| The notion that users are being somehow kept hostage by not
| being able to pick and choose their own suite of document
| components is almost completely contrary to the history of
| consolidation within this industry and others. Picking a
| collection of best of breed software components is asking
| way, way, way too much of the vast majority of users, who
| mainly had a specific set of goals, one of the most
| important of which is to get on with the rest of life.
| About the best that can be achieved with this sort of
| software architecture is add on components that fill
| specific gaps in existing suites (and then likely get
| rolled into the suites themselves).
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > This was the early 90's, and Microsoft Windows was the
| dominant OS. In addition, Microsoft Office was also becoming
| the dominant office software.
|
| Are both of these still not the case?
| jbandela1 wrote:
| In terms of dominant OS, I think Microsoft is no longer the
| dominant OS, even though it is the most used OS for laptops
| and desktops.
|
| Back in the 1990's, Windows was the center of the developer
| universe. Think how mobile developers eagerly wait to see
| what Apple will do. It was even more so for developers in the
| 1990's. There were huge Windows dev conferences. There was a
| ton of excitement for a new release of Windows or a new
| version of Visual C++/Visual Basic/Visual Studio.
|
| Now, although there are a lot of computers that run Windows,
| Windows is not the center of gravity for developers. A new
| iOS release or a new AWS service has far more impact on
| developers than any new Microsoft Windows feature.
|
| Joel has a great writeup on this from some time back:
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-
| lost...
| scarface74 wrote:
| I work at AWS and even I admit that a new AWS feature
| doesn't have as big of an impact as a Windows feature or an
| Office feature.
|
| Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS (and soon Amazon), has said
| repeatedly in public statements that only 4% of all
| enterprise IT spend is on any cloud provider.
|
| Office is far more ubiquitous in the enterprise than AWS.
| Not to mention all of the home users who have Office 365
| running on their computers and mobile devices.
| Macha wrote:
| I don't think that's what he's saying. Of course, Joe
| Small Business Owner is going to care more about new
| features in Outlook or Excel than about new features in
| AWS. But I don't think _developers, specifically_ are
| looking out for the new office extension APIs in the same
| way they're looking for e.g. improvements to EKS.
| scarface74 wrote:
| If only 4% of all enterprise spend is on any cloud
| provider and AWS has I believe 36% of the market, and on
| top of that AWS has 260 services (at least that's the
| number of distinct IAM resource types), I would think
| there was a larger third party market for Office
| extensions and dark matter developers doing
| Office/Sharepoint automation than who cared about a new
| AWS feature.
|
| There are a lot more people working at AWS dependent on
| MS office than MS people depending on an Amazon
| service.....
| tester756 wrote:
| but it's the moment when Visual Studio Code steps in :P
| Ansil849 wrote:
| Ah, I see what you mean. That was a really helpful
| contextualization, thank you!
| dguaraglia wrote:
| Arguably, the dominant OS nowadays is whatever your phone
| runs, plus whatever serves the websites you consume.
| Microsoft Office reigns unchallenged though.
| gamache wrote:
| Windows may be the dominant desktop OS, but Linux (via
| Android) has a larger install base now.
|
| As for office software, G Suite took over the top spot from
| MS Office a few years ago.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Linux kernel is only an implementation detail on Android.
|
| Userspace is a mix of Java, Kotlin, ISO C and ISO C++
| standard libraries, and Android specific native APIs.
|
| Nothing from Linux side is considered public API other than
| for OEMs providing their own device customisations, not app
| developers consumption.
|
| G Suite still has too much to learn from Office
| capabilities.
| scarface74 wrote:
| GSuite is nowhere near the "top spot". It's nowhere close.
|
| https://www.ciodive.com/news/g-suite-passes-2b-monthly-
| activ...
|
| > Microsoft owns nearly 90% of the office suite market, or
| email and authoring market, as Gartner calls it. Google
| holds onto just over 10%, but is gaining about 1% market
| share annually.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Perhaps GP meant "online office suite"
| scarface74 wrote:
| Isn't that a distinction without a difference? All of the
| office suites have both online and offline capabilities -
| even Apple's iWork.
|
| On the other hand, I hardly ever use the online version
| of GSuite, I use the iOS versions that can all work
| offline.
| philistine wrote:
| And think of all the Linux user base on servers and the
| fact that macOS and iOS are somewhat like Linux. Unix is
| huge baby!
| pjmlp wrote:
| Anyone writing portable software across UNIX will
| painfully discover why stuff like autoconf was born.
| EricE wrote:
| It didn't help that Apple was broke and Steve was more focused
| on keeping Apple alive than funding pie in the sky initiatives
| that may or may not work out - as Apple continued to bleed
| money.
|
| A little of column A, a little of column B - in the end it
| didn't survive.
|
| But don't take my word for it - from the man himself:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| > The hardware wasn't there:
|
| ...
|
| > The average Mac had about 2 megabytes of memory. OpenDoc
| wouldn't run on a machine with less than 4 megs, and
| realistically, 8 megs was probably what you wanted.
|
| Maybe I'm misreading this but this feels like a focus on the neat
| technology rather than what the user gets out of the technology.
| Sure, OpenDoc was cool component-based stuff, but if someone's
| 2MB Mac runs Word or MacWrite or whatever just fine, they aren't
| going to upgrade their hardware to run your OpenDoc-based word
| processor. Oh, but I could embed a QuickTime component in my text
| document? What does that even mean? When I print my document, I
| get to see a blurry postage-stamp sized video thumbnail in my
| document? Hoo boy!
| twoWhlsGud wrote:
| As someone who worked on the predecessor to OpenDoc (Apple
| Document Framework) I think a key issue was that the HyperMedia
| underpinnings that motivated our work took too
| long to happen and depended on structured media less
| than we anticipated.
|
| A world in a which a sea of interlinked richly structured
| documents existed would have likely been a world where the
| advantages of OpenDoc-like architectures would have mattered. As
| it was the WWW (when it happened some years after ADF and
| AppleScript were conceived) turned out to do just fine with
| loosely structured text and bitmap images.
|
| Within the business app world (as other folks have noted) the
| incumbent players pretty much stuck with their monolithic
| architectures (to this day embedding structured media within web
| pages isn't well supported - how would you stick an Excel or
| Numbers spreadsheet in a page today?).
|
| A more alarming trend has been the growing disinterest among the
| major players toward advancing the cause of end user authoring of
| structured media (e.g. anything besides video and throwaway
| picture taking). Perhaps the success of the computer as
| consumption enabler makes progress in this area uninteresting
| from a commercial perspective.
|
| While I do industrial stuff now, I miss the days when authoring
| tools were seen as arenas for innovation - heaven knows there's a
| lot of room to make the likes of Word, OneNote, Visio etc more
| powerful and usable.
| K7PJP wrote:
| OpenDoc was never going to get widespread adoption, there's
| little attraction for developers.
|
| MacOS Services offers a more lightweight means of adding
| capabilities across applications.
|
| The LinkBack project http://linkbackproject.org is/was a better
| way for developers to integrate content from other applications
| into their own. A user can paste content from any LinkBack-
| enabled application into another and reopen that content later
| for editing with just a double-click. Changes will automatically
| appear in the original document again when you save.
|
| I think a lot of applications that once supported it no longer
| do, as Apple's security enhancements have required some big
| changes in the implementation.
| marianoguerra wrote:
| Would really like to know what's your theory on why component
| based software failed in those cases and if Web Components
| learned/solved those problems.
| goto11 wrote:
| It seems like a solution in search of a problem? How often do
| you need to embed a spreadsheet in word-processing document?
|
| Furthermore, making components from multiple independent
| vendors interact seamlessly is just an _incredibly_ complex
| problem. The web is probably the most successful decentralized
| system, and this is because the common integration point which
| all must support is very very simple: URL 's and links.
| bombcar wrote:
| The web has mostly removed the need - but pre-web the ability
| to have embedded objects in documents was powerful, if tricky
| to implement correctly.
| toyg wrote:
| ... and a security nightmare.
| bombcar wrote:
| Oh sure, but this is when computers were basically
| independent machines, and rarely, if ever connected to
| anything beyond a LAN.
| jerf wrote:
| Web components is more equivalent to GUI toolkits than office
| plugins. For web components to be a solution they'd need quite
| a lot of augmenting, like, a standard way to serialize and
| deserialize document-like content out of them. I don't think
| there is such a thing right now, having re-checked the MDN
| documentation on them, but if I'm wrong I'm sure the Internet
| will let me know.
|
| You probably could augment your way up to something that would
| work more like OpenDoc without too much hassle in principle,
| but it'd be a lot of work in practice.
| EricE wrote:
| Dunno why the author didn't just listen to the man himself on why
| OpenDOC failed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE
| shockeychap wrote:
| Steve Jobs' take at the time:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o
|
| "You've gotta start with the customer experience and work
| backwards to the technology."
|
| Couldn't agree more. And I'm guilty of doing the opposite.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I've seen this video a few times now, and what's amazing about
| it is that Jobs freely admits he doesn't even really know what
| OpenDoc was really all about as he goes on this presentation.
| It's nicely presented, but frankly I think it was off target. I
| would be pissed if I was the questioner who initiated it
| (though the questioner was very rude)
|
| As I see it, OpenDoc's entire purpose was to benefit the user,
| as it put the focus on the user's intent and document rather
| than on the applications used to assemble it. The person who
| would have struggled to see the benefit was the application
| publishing houses, not the user. So I think this is all a bit
| disingenuous. There was a clear user benefit to something like
| OpenDoc, and frankly I think the era where Jobs returns to
| Apple is in fact the turning point where Apple went from an
| end-user focused company ("the computer for the rest of us") to
| a lifestyle/luxury-branding company.
|
| That obviously has given them far better financial success, but
| has it benefited the world like Jobs liked to pontificate?
|
| Frankly, what it comes down to is this: OpenDoc had no home at
| Apple, because the return of Jobs was not just a management
| transplant from NeXT to Apple, but a tech one as well, and Jobs
| & Tevanian etc. wanted to replace/supplant MacOS with what they
| had developed at NeXT. Like the Newton and other tech, OpenDoc
| was something innovated at Apple during the years while he was
| exiled. So it had to go and be replaced with whatever the
| NeXTstep/OpenStep world would want instead.
|
| There's an excellent comment on that YouTube video, which I
| thought was insightful:
|
| "Watch Ramblings 9 months ago (edited) This was actually a
| fairly disastrous response from Steve Jobs that really hurt the
| company. This was 1997, more than a decade before the iPhone,
| and the Apple Macintosh (the company's sole product) was in bad
| shape. The questioner here was referring to the fact that Apple
| had just pulled the plug on support for OpenDoc, a cross-
| platform software framework for creating complex documents.
| Many developers (such as the questioner) had devoted years to
| the OpenDoc technology and made a livelihood developing
| applications for it since 1992, and thought Jobs abruptly
| dropped the technology without good reason. The questioner was
| asking, dude, why did you pull it? Jobs' response was
| basically, tough shit, no answer. Developers learned that
| technologies that were sacred to Apple one year could be
| dropped the next without cause or warning, so many devs
| concluded the investment wasn't worth it and abandoned the
| Macintosh platform in droves. The market share for the
| Macintosh would drop by more than 50% over the next two years
| as the (few) remaining developers who were loyal to the
| Macintosh platform fled to the greener pastures of Windows.
| People look at this response with rose colored glasses because
| of what Apple would become many, many years later, but this was
| actually a very poor way to respond to a legit question
| (although posed angrily) from the type of developers that Apple
| really needed to keep happy."
| athenot wrote:
| I had a real soft spot for OpenDoc, remembering seeing the
| demos at AppleExpo in the late 90's.
|
| Yes you have to start with what people need and go from there.
| However, you can also start from what a niche of people need
| and go from there.
|
| Honestly I think OpenDoc was way too ahead of its time to be
| groked by mainstream users. Currently we have various workbook
| online apps (like Observable) that are similar in spirit and
| super useful to those who know how to leverage them, but
| haven't yet crossed into the mainstream.
| shockeychap wrote:
| I can understand this. I've been enamored with good
| engineering many a time, and it has its place. Something
| that's well engineered often WANTS to be a good solution. But
| I also agree with the concept of starting with "where can I
| take the customer" rather "how can I present this awesome new
| technology".
|
| Another variation on this concept was an article by Joel
| Spolsky in which he coined the term "Architecture
| Astronauts". He describes well the manner in which an
| architecture astronaut looks at something like Napster and
| generalizes to peer-to-peer messaging while missing the
| excitement of "search for song. find song.".
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-
| architect...
| duxup wrote:
| You see it time and again where a X clone shows up and you
| use it and realize ... the clone has no soul and none of
| the convince or emotion that what it tries to copy has. It
| copies the notes but can't put a song together.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You never tried to use CyberDog...
| pcurve wrote:
| Oh, do you happen to remember this OpenDoc vs OLE (with
| Gates) t-shirt?
|
| https://www.depop.com/products/chard_on-vintage-microsoft-
| op...
|
| I went to a big computer trade show at Jacob Javitz center in
| the 90s and got this same shirt.
|
| On a side note, my memory of OpenDoc isn't as rosy as others.
| It was very slow and memory hog, when memory cost was
| astronomical. Use cases was too niche for ordinary users.
| mirthflat83 wrote:
| I watched this video more than a dozen times over the years and
| never realized he was talking about OpenDoc haha
| jere wrote:
| Lol how? It's the main thrust of the question and the answer
| as well???
| neonate wrote:
| There isn't anything specific to OpenDoc in there. The real
| question is "why did you kill this technology that I loved"
| and the answer could apply to any such case.
| twoodfin wrote:
| _Customer_ is actually doing as much work as _experience_ in
| that beautifully apt & precise phrase.
|
| For developers, the idea of being able to build and sell a
| little specialized widget of functionality--the best
| spellchecker ever made--had obvious appeal. It might even
| provide a truly outstanding experience for users. But where
| would you find a customer excited about assembling their own
| word processor out of a dozen independently purchased
| components?
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah given user's goal with a doc is to ... communicate or
| otherwise do a thing. Working WITH the doc, picking
| components, or picking among a bunch of document editors,
| thinking about document technology is not their goal.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| One of the best pieces of advice I have been given is "design
| for people who aren't you". Turns out, the vast majority of
| people want something that "just works" and involves no
| configuration or in-depth understanding. That's not a bad
| thing, either.
| toast0 wrote:
| I mean spellcheck might actually make a lot of sense (if the
| hooks were appropriate). The interface is mostly set, but the
| word list and how you figure out if words in the document are
| correct have a lot of potential variation. Selling the
| product seems like a lot of work though. Maybe if you could
| add spell check in a language not included in the box, that
| would have at least a chance regionally.
|
| But things that are maybe even more potentially useful like
| math formula editors get really hairy if you want to share
| documents. Then people viewing the customer's documents might
| need a special viewer or a licensed copy of the editor if
| they want to adjust things. It's a big mess.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| in all fariness, B2B is a perfectly viable business model. If
| you don't or can't care about the UX, sell the hard work
| making the tech to some company that has those UX engineers
| to make that spell checker "just work". other companies are
| very happy to pay devs to put those components together (and
| serving a dev struggling with an API is likely easier than a
| user struggling with the UX).
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah I've 'fixed' things now and then and sat back and clicked
| some buttons and watched it work only to realize that really
| ... I was clicking the same buttons getting the same thing just
| like it was before and getting roughly the same output /
| experience.
|
| I wasn't wrong, some stuff needed to get fixed and it was
| better, but the customer's experience really didn't get much
| better... not a lot changed.
|
| I was thinking tech first and working towards the customer
| experience ... didn't have much to show for the effort when I
| put it all together.
| shockeychap wrote:
| I've also been really excited about a solution only to
| realize that my excitement was with the underlying technology
| rather than the customer experience.
|
| I remember this feeling with early web apps. I was excited
| about being able to update one system rather than several
| desktops. For the customer, however, the overall UX was
| actually a slight step down because of the limitations of
| HTML and javascript.
| overgard wrote:
| Arguably the Web does everything OpenDoc was designed to do. And
| better. The idea wasn't necessarily horrible (rich documents
| filled with disparate components.), but the technology was a bad
| idea (C++ish sort of OOP stuff... dynamic languages like
| javascript are just way more natural for this sort of thing).
| flakiness wrote:
| Yeah, specifically <iframe> has done almost everything what
| these UI-based component technology wanted to achieve.
| ghaff wrote:
| Essentially every attempt to provide a viable mainstream
| alternative to Word for Windows failed (to a first approximation)
| until online office suites became viable. [ADDED: I understand
| this wasn't intended to be directly a Word competitor but it was
| part of a general industry interest in Microsoft competition.]
|
| You can critique individual efforts but there wasn't really a big
| appetite for Word competitors and there was a lot of inertia
| among mainstream office workers.
| bombcar wrote:
| I feel that online office suites only became viable because
| they had multiplayer Word and Excel before Microsoft did (and
| Google Docs was free).
|
| The "online" aspect was so good that people overlooked the
| shortcomings compared to Office.
| ghaff wrote:
| >overlooked the shortcomings compared to Office.
|
| I agree with your general point but I'd also argue that, for
| a lot of people (including myself), the reduced feature set
| was mostly a feature, not a bug. I use presentation and word
| processor apps a lot, but I'm not really a "power user" these
| days.
| Macha wrote:
| I can't say I've ever missed any Word features in Google
| Docs, and would pretty much agree there. There have been a
| few cases I wished Google Sheets did more and found Excel
| did support what I was looking for, though back when I used
| Excel (mostly in college) I used it less heavily then I use
| Google Sheets today.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Not sure if this is what you're implying but OpenDoc wasn't a
| competitor to Office, it was a development framework.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
| ghaff wrote:
| I understand that. I worded it poorly. But it was still part
| of a general space that was interested in Microsoft
| alternatives.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Ah cool cool. My bad!
| compressedgas wrote:
| OpenDoc was the 15-20 year latter rewrite of the Lisa Toolkit.
| masswerk wrote:
| However, since LISA OS came with an integrated tools package
| (as in "7/7") turning the tools into components (to be used by
| universal documents) would have posed less a problem. I think,
| it's really the third party aspect that doesn't match the
| model.
| flenserboy wrote:
| Yep. The only way this could work in a real-world sense would
| be for it to _be_ the OS, and for the OS to be purpose-built
| to function this way from the start. Completely extensible,
| completely communicative between modules (and good luck with
| that), completely a security nightmare.
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