Re: (OFF) What Ever Happened To OpenDoc?
Re: (OFF) What Ever Happened To OpenDoc?
- Subject: Re: (OFF) What Ever Happened To OpenDoc?
- From: Jon Pugh <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 15:40:14 -0700
At 6:25 PM +0200 7/26/2001, Stefaan Degryse wrote:
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Didn't that have something to do with pressure from Microsoft too, who were
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not at all happy (understatement) with the OpenDoc technology from Apple
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'cause they believed it was some sort of copyright rip off of one of their
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own technologies?
Microsoft did not like OpenDoc because some developers perceived it as a competitor of OLE, and you know how Microsoft likes competition.
OpenDoc had a lot of good *and* bad in it. There were too many APIs and behavioral issues with programming it. It was a compound document model which didn't address several things people were attempting to do with it. The OpenDoc marketing weasels insisted it was going to change the way software was sold, when it couldn't (because of other market pressures, like distribution, etc).
However, copyright had nothing to do with it.
At 12:59 PM -0400 7/26/2001, Anthony Adachi wrote:
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Although, I haven't tried so yet, myself, it's AppleScriptable too.
Unsurprisingly, that's what I worked on.
At 4:40 PM -0400 7/26/2001, email@hidden wrote:
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This was a technology that was unexplainable to the consumer. You only
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really grasped its benefits AFTER you used it. As such, it was impossible to
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introduce into the mass marketplace. And in order for it to survive, it HAD
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to get into the mass market.
A far greater problem was getting developers to use it. By the time OpenDoc shipped, Apple had already drop kicked Copland, Quickdraw GX and PowerTalk out the door. Developers were uneasy about supporting new APIs from Apple because of this.
That turns out to have been a wise move for most of them, eh?
Jon