[Am-info] query about MS "Innovations"

[Mitch Stone]

On Saturday, March 30, 2002, at 09:11 AM, John Bryan wrote:

> Get your Joo-janta Rant Protective Eyewear ready....
>
> On Friday, March 29, 2002, at 01:40  PM, Felmon Davis wrote:
>>
>> It sounds like the answer is not very clear-cut. Recall the original
>> question: Has MS 'innovated' in 'interoperability' in office suites
>> either in the sense of (a) inventing new functionality (the 'whole
>> idea' of an office suite, so to speak) or (b) inventing new plumbing
>> (OLE, DDE, whatever).
>>
>
> If an 'office suite' suite is an innovation, it is in that it was just 
> another way for MS to do the same thing as they've always done.  The part 
> of the apps working together was not a part of it in the beginning.

If bundling three applications into one box is an "innovation," then I 
believe Microsoft can claim credit for it. I can check the history on this 
if anyone is interested, but as I recall the debut of Microsoft Office 
sent Novell scrambling for an office suite of their own, which they were 
not exactly sharp about delivering.

[snip]

>> The sense I'm getting from the replies are:
>>
>> ad (a): maybe but perhaps more a matter of 'great minds thinking
>> alike' since NeXT and Apple ('Publish and Subscribe') had similar
>> designs at the same time. but - perhaps - even OLE and DDE are IBM
>> inventions. so this is all unclear until I can do some historical
>> research.
>>
>
> People keep forgetting OpenDoc, which IMO is the tech that MS' reacted to 
> with OLE, (which was called something else before that, it has undergone 
> several name changes, eg. now it is ".Net", bascially OLE++).   OpenDoc 
> was document centered, not application centered.  With OLE, yeah, you can 
> bring in an Excel spreadsheet into your Word doc, but you had to then 
> open two big fat apps.  With OpenDoc you basically have small, single 
> purpose components, from which you can pick and choose.  Maybe a Greek 
> spell checker component, for example.  That is a weak explanation but it 
> has been awhile.
>
> This is not so much having big, feature-fat apps, requiring megs and megs 
> of RAM, interoperating. What is the big gain in that?  You now have 2 or 
> 3 or more software manatees (no offense to the Manatee!) all running at 
> once to work on a SINGLE document.  Rather OpenDoc proposed a different 
> approach, a document-centric versus application-centric approach. You don'
> t have a single app that does everything you would ever and never want to 
> do with a 'text' document, or with a 'spreadsheet' document, and so on.  
> You just have a document, and you can put whatever you want in it, using 
> the different OpenDoc style spices in your spice rack.

Cut it out, you're making me shed yet another tear for the death of 
OpenDoc...


   Mitch Stone
   mitch@accidentalexpert.com