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Why did OpenDoc fail, and then fail 3 more times?
- marianoguerra 5y agoWould really like to know what's your theory on why component based software failed in those cases and if Web Components learned/solved those problems.
- goto11 5y agoIt seems like a solution in search of a problem? How often do you need to embed a spreadsheet in word-processing document? Furthermore, making components from multiple independent vendors interact seamlessly is just an incredibly complex problem. The web is probably the most successful decentralized system, and this is because the common integration point which all must support is very very simple: URL's and links.
- bombcar 5y agoThe web has mostly removed the need - but pre-web the ability to have embedded objects in documents was powerful, if tricky to implement correctly.
- jerf 5y agoWeb components is more equivalent to GUI toolkits than office plugins. For web components to be a solution they'd need quite a lot of augmenting, like, a standard way to serialize and deserialize document-like content out of them. I don't think there is such a thing right now, having re-checked the MDN documentation on them, but if I'm wrong I'm sure the Internet will let me know. You probably could augment your way up to something that would work more like OpenDoc without too much hassle in principle, but it'd be a lot of work in practice.
- shockeychap 5y agoSteve Jobs' take at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o "You've gotta start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology." Couldn't agree more. And I'm guilty of doing the opposite.
- athenot 5y agoI had a real soft spot for OpenDoc, remembering seeing the demos at AppleExpo in the late 90's. Yes you have to start with what people need and go from there. However, you can also start from what a niche of people need and go from there. Honestly I think OpenDoc was way too ahead of its time to be groked by mainstream users. Currently we have various workbook online apps (like Observable) that are similar in spirit and super useful to those who know how to leverage them, but haven't yet crossed into the mainstream.
- shockeychap 5y agoI can understand this. I've been enamored with good engineering many a time, and it has its place. Something that's well engineered often WANTS to be a good solution. But I also agree with the concept of starting with "where can I take the customer" rather "how can I present this awesome new technology". Another variation on this concept was an article by Joel Spolsky in which he coined the term "Architecture Astronauts". He describes well the manner in which an architecture astronaut looks at something like Napster and generalizes to peer-to-peer messaging while missing the excitement of "search for song. find song.". https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...
- duxup 5y agoYou see it time and again where a X clone shows up and you use it and realize ... the clone has no soul and none of the convince or emotion that what it tries to copy has. It copies the notes but can't put a song together.
- pcurve 5y ago
- ghaff 5y agoEssentially every attempt to provide a viable mainstream alternative to Word for Windows failed (to a first approximation) until online office suites became viable. [ADDED: I understand this wasn't intended to be directly a Word competitor but it was part of a general industry interest in Microsoft competition.] You can critique individual efforts but there wasn't really a big appetite for Word competitors and there was a lot of inertia among mainstream office workers.
- bombcar 5y agoI feel that online office suites only became viable because they had multiplayer Word and Excel before Microsoft did (and Google Docs was free). The "online" aspect was so good that people overlooked the shortcomings compared to Office.
- ghaff 5y ago>overlooked the shortcomings compared to Office. I agree with your general point but I'd also argue that, for a lot of people (including myself), the reduced feature set was mostly a feature, not a bug. I use presentation and word processor apps a lot, but I'm not really a "power user" these days.
- Macha 5y agoI can't say I've ever missed any Word features in Google Docs, and would pretty much agree there. There have been a few cases I wished Google Sheets did more and found Excel did support what I was looking for, though back when I used Excel (mostly in college) I used it less heavily then I use Google Sheets today.
- sodapopcan 5y agoNot sure if this is what you're implying but OpenDoc wasn't a competitor to Office, it was a development framework. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
- 5y ago
- tobr 5y agoIs it fair to compare OpenDoc with something like Notion? It has the same concept of being able to construct documents from many smaller relatively independent parts, except of course that the parts are all created by the same company.
- acjohnson55 5y agoI think Notion is missing the ability of its documents being embeddable outside of its app.
- veidr 5y agoNo, because the entire point of OpenDoc was that the parts could be created by different entities.
- compressedgas 5y agoOpenDoc was the 15-20 year latter rewrite of the Lisa Toolkit.
- masswerk 5y agoHowever, since LISA OS came with an integrated tools package (as in "7/7") turning the tools into components (to be used by universal documents) would have posed less a problem. I think, it's really the third party aspect that doesn't match the model.
- flenserboy 5y agoYep. The only way this could work in a real-world sense would be for it to be the OS, and for the OS to be purpose-built to function this way from the start. Completely extensible, completely communicative between modules (and good luck with that), completely a security nightmare.
- jbandela1 5y agoI think the big reason OpenDoc failed is because it was completely steamrolled by Microsoft OLE 2. These are complicated enough APIs that a developer is typically going to only implement one. To better understand, it helps to go back in time when this was going on. This was the early 90's, and Microsoft Windows was the dominant OS. In addition, Microsoft Office was also becoming the dominant office software. Microsoft put a lot of it's energy behind OLE 2. Office supported it. If you wanted your application to be certified for Windows 95, you needed to support OLE 2. OLE 2 was pushed at all the Microsoft Developer conferences. Every book and magazine about Windows development pushed OLE 2. Microsoft's Visual C++ MFC framework supported OLE 2, and in fact, their Scribble tutorial included a section on implementing OLE 2. Visual Basic supported OLE 2, and in fact their custom controls were OLE 2 objects. Thus if you supported OLE 2, you had a ton of documentation, tooling, libraries, dev environments that supported it. You could get Windows 95 application certification. You would be able to embed Office documents in your application, or have Office embed your documents in Office. IIRC, Visio started out as an independent application that had great OLE 2 support and was eventually acquired by Microsoft. And you could tell that OLE 2 was a huge priority for Microsoft. In fact, the rumored next generation successor to Windows 95 and Windows NT, Cairo was supposed to be built on OLE 2 from the ground up. (Cairo never materialized). On the other hand you had OpenDoc, which did not have nearly as big of a market. It was not the priority for any of the companies pushing it. Unlike with Microsoft Office and OLE 2, there wasn't a halo product that showed off the user benefits of OpenDoc. There wasn't nearly the documentation and tooling and libraries for OpenDoc. Given all that, I don't consider it surprising that OpenDoc failed.
- Ansil849 5y ago> This was the early 90's, and Microsoft Windows was the dominant OS. In addition, Microsoft Office was also becoming the dominant office software. Are both of these still not the case?
- dguaraglia 5y agoArguably, the dominant OS nowadays is whatever your phone runs, plus whatever serves the websites you consume. Microsoft Office reigns unchallenged though.
- lastofthemojito 5y ago> The hardware wasn't there: ... > The average Mac had about 2 megabytes of memory. OpenDoc wouldn’t run on a machine with less than 4 megs, and realistically, 8 megs was probably what you wanted. Maybe I'm misreading this but this feels like a focus on the neat technology rather than what the user gets out of the technology. Sure, OpenDoc was cool component-based stuff, but if someone's 2MB Mac runs Word or MacWrite or whatever just fine, they aren't going to upgrade their hardware to run your OpenDoc-based word processor. Oh, but I could embed a QuickTime component in my text document? What does that even mean? When I print my document, I get to see a blurry postage-stamp sized video thumbnail in my document? Hoo boy!
- dunham 5y agoIt's been decades since I looked at it, but I remember Andrew User Interface System being another attempt at this. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~AUIS/ https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~AUIS/
- EricE 5y agoDunno why the author didn't just listen to the man himself on why OpenDOC failed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE
- overgard 5y agoArguably the Web does everything OpenDoc was designed to do. And better. The idea wasn't necessarily horrible (rich documents filled with disparate components.), but the technology was a bad idea (C++ish sort of OOP stuff... dynamic languages like javascript are just way more natural for this sort of thing).
- flakiness 5y agoYeah, specifically <iframe> has done almost everything what these UI-based component technology wanted to achieve.
- K7PJP 5y agoOpenDoc was never going to get widespread adoption, there's little attraction for developers. MacOS Services offers a more lightweight means of adding capabilities across applications. The LinkBack project http://linkbackproject.org http://linkbackproject.org is/was a better way for developers to integrate content from other applications into their own. A user can paste content from any LinkBack-enabled application into another and reopen that content later for editing with just a double-click. Changes will automatically appear in the original document again when you save. I think a lot of applications that once supported it no longer do, as Apple's security enhancements have required some big changes in the implementation.
- twoWhlsGud 5y agoAs someone who worked on the predecessor to OpenDoc (Apple Document Framework) I think a key issue was that the HyperMedia underpinnings that motivated our work took too long to happen and depended on structured media less than we anticipated. A world in a which a sea of interlinked richly structured documents existed would have likely been a world where the advantages of OpenDoc-like architectures would have mattered. As it was the WWW (when it happened some years after ADF and AppleScript were conceived) turned out to do just fine with loosely structured text and bitmap images. Within the business app world (as other folks have noted) the incumbent players pretty much stuck with their monolithic architectures (to this day embedding structured media within web pages isn't well supported - how would you stick an Excel or Numbers spreadsheet in a page today?). A more alarming trend has been the growing disinterest among the major players toward advancing the cause of end user authoring of structured media (e.g. anything besides video and throwaway picture taking). Perhaps the success of the computer as consumption enabler makes progress in this area uninteresting from a commercial perspective. While I do industrial stuff now, I miss the days when authoring tools were seen as arenas for innovation - heaven knows there's a lot of room to make the likes of Word, OneNote, Visio etc more powerful and usable.
- slver 5y agoIt doesn't help that the exact purpose of OpenDoc can't be explained. There's no clear killer app or purpose of it. It's a a platform for combining things on documents. For god knows what reason. You might say "it's not for documents you fool". That's what THEY called it. It's in the name. So add that to the list of reasons.