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

[Mitch Stone]

I don't know if Microsoft was ever asked to implement OpenDoc in Windows. 
They way I saw it at the time, OpenDoc was a Microsoft-killer, or at least 
it offered a significant alternative to Microsoft's approach, application 
bloat.

On Sunday, March 31, 2002, at 10:50 AM, Erick Andrews wrote:

> 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