As 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

As 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.