[Am-info] Re: query about MS "Innovations"

[Erick Andrews]

On Sun, 31 Mar 2002 09:56:44 -0800, Mitch Stone wrote:

>
>On Sunday, March 31, 2002, at 09:01 AM, Gene Gaines wrote:
>
>> Regarding data sharing among applications, wasn't Apple's OpenDoc earlier
>> and better than OLE?
>
>I believe OLE was released before OpenDoc, but this isn't the relevant 
>comparison in any event. As I said earlier, Publish and Subscribe was 
>Apple's comparative technology, and it did arrive before OLE. John has 
>already explained OpenDoc in some detail. Compared to object linking, it 
>was potentially a much more revolutionary approach -- unlike object 
>linking, which is applications-centric, OpenDoc was document-centric.
>

I think that OLE and OpenDoc are good comparisons because  a), from a
technological view, they are both "data access methods", and  b), from 
the user point of view they are both legitimate "approaches" toward doing 
related work. 

It seems to me that MS didn't embrace OpenDoc because they didn't
want to, or thought didn't have to compete this way.  Maybe also because 
OpenDoc would have required them to invest much more in their OS 
technology, (become more OO OS oriented) that they felt they didn't 
have to?  If so, they likely understood that users starting with one way
of doing things like to stay in the same "groove" and won't easily change.

-- 
Erick Andrews