[Am-info] query about MS "Innovations"

[Mitch Stone]

On Friday, March 29, 2002, at 06:30 AM, Sujal Shah wrote:

> On Fri, 2002-03-29 at 02:59, felmon davis wrote:
> [snip]
>>
>> today I was talking to a colleague, an economist, when the issue of
>> the anti-trust suit briefly came up. he felt one had to grant that MS
>> had been 'innovative' in certain regards and he mentioned the idea of
>> enabling different apps to work together.
>>
>> I think he either meant (a) the idea of the 'office suite' or (b) the
>> OLE mechanisms for data exchange among apps.
>>
>
> I'm not sure about the office suite, but I've seen OLE and DDE ideas
> from a couple of different vendors at about the same time.  Apple, I
> think or NeXT (i can't remember the timeline) had something very similar
> around the same time as Windows 3.1 came out.  I even had someone (a
> NeXT user) show me a video tape that laid out the embed and exchange
> concepts that NeXTStep/OpenStep was designed for.

Before Microsoft had OLE, Apple had Publish and Subscribe. Unfortunately, 
too few applications supported it, and it faded away.


   Mitch Stone
   mitch@accidentalexpert.com