Conversation

Best papers/talks/etc about why OpenDoc failed?

May 3, 2021

OpenDoc in particular, or the broader genre of publisher/subscriber frameworks? OLE was "successful" on Windows among the Office apps, but I don't think third parties wanted their apps to be relegated to "components" inside views controlled by the platform owner

Greg Titus

@gregtitus

May 3, 2021

Yeah, in general: capitalism. OpenDoc-esque components may or may not be better for users, but for producers breaking down walled gardens and making pieces swap-out-able so that they become undifferentiated commodities is not the way to make any money.

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Interesting that this is a deal breaker for GUI software but apparently not for UNIX tools, libraries, etc.

3:33 PM · May 3, 2021Twitter Web App

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I think if you were able to get a critical mass of open source or if you were able to start over with OpenDoc as the design as soon as GUIs were invented it might work. But with the entrenched productivity apps and their existing users already there, I don't think it could.

Eric Green New Deal Now Gade

@ecgade

May 3, 2021

We have "trained" generations of personal computing users to be consumers only, and modern software reflects that distinction. The 90s were more experimental in that regard

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UNIX might've had the benefit of being seeded in academia with a more cooperative ethos. Look at how attempts to move anything beyond the POSIX baseline today get splintered into platform-owner-specific initiatives though

Joe Groff

@jckarter

May 3, 2021

and the rise of container middleware could be seen as a way of retrofitting "app"-ness onto systems built out of Unix tools

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One big factor might be that when you're dealing with plain text IO on the command line, interoperability (to a degree) comes sort of for free and it's not a burden on the developer of a given tool, vs. in the GUI realm you'd have to build extra interfaces