Comment by mschaef | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschaef | Hacker News Reader

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> I think the big reason OpenDoc failed is because it was completely steamrolled by Microsoft OLE 2.

I think the bigger reason may be this, from the original article:

> Most folks at Claris, Apple’s application group, didn’t want it at all, seeing it as an enabler for competition to Claris’s office suite product, ClarisWorks.

The trouble with composite documents is that it goes against the market's tendency to accrete power to the incumbent.

* If you're WRITING document software, the composite document model adds a bunch of development complexity for (mainly) the purpose of opening doors for your competitors to eat away at your lock in. From a marketing perspective, If I'm writing document software I'd probably much rather you use _my_ spreadsheet than whatever spreadsheet you want. From a support perspective, it's easier if I own the code on both sides of an embedding. From a development perspective, it's easier to add more differentiated features if I don't have to force everything through a common document embedding model, etc.

* If you're USING document prep software, the composite document model adds complexity to the way you install and buy software, the UX for the software, and then what you can do with the documents you create with your carefully curated software suite.

There are ways that all of this can be addressed from a technical perspective, but the end reality is that the costs are too high and the return too limited to be useful.

(As you point out, OLE2 has seen a lot of market acceptance, but a lot of that comes in the context of MS Office. Despite the availability of embedding technology within OLE2, The market didn't gravitate to hand-curated sets of best-of-breed office software. The market gravitated to MS Office with specific add ons for specific use cases. Even then, in settings where not everybody had those add on packages, there was a tendency to push documents to fit into whatever stock MS Office would support.)

> The market didn't gravitate to hand-curated sets of best-of-breed office software

By this time, in terms of software for Windows, the programs that came with Microsoft Office were best of breed (or else pretty close).

From In Search of Stupidity by Merril Chapman:

>The only problem with this theory was that the competition didn't have the best-of-breed products; Microsoft did. Though Quattro was always well rated by the press and usually beat Lotus 1-2-3 in head-to-head competitions, it almost invariably was an also-ran to the top-ranked product, Microsoft Excel. WordPerfect's botched release of its first Windows-based word processor had landed the one-time ruler of the category in third place. First and second places were usually fought over by Microsoft Word and Lotus's AmiPro. Microsoft PowerPoint and Lotus Freelance usually struggled for the business presentation graphics crown, but the spreadsheet and word-processing elements were the most important factors in a buyer's decision. Advantage: Microsoft.

>Both Borland and WordPerfect attempted to fight back with competing office suites assembled from each other's respective products (with SPC's faded Harvard Graphics thrown into the mix), but they were unsuccessful. Not surprisingly, the new suites lacked the integration of Microsoft Office, but more important, they were bundles of second- and third-class programs competing against top-ranked contenders. Lotus SmartSuite faced a similar problem. Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows never placed higher than second in competitive face-offs and usually came in third place (a shocking comedown for the one-time category leader). AmiPro sometimes outplaced Microsoft Word, but Lotus was, after all, the spreadsheet company. Freelance usually placed second to PowerPoint in reviews, and the suite's database, Approach, although a decent product, wasn't well known and brought little extra credibility to the package.

So both Microsoft and Apple, steamrolled the project with the money they were making by keeping users hostage.

At the time it happened, I'd have been sympathetic to that phrasing. In the couple decades then, I'm grown much more sanguine about it.

The notion that users are being somehow kept hostage by not being able to pick and choose their own suite of document components is almost completely contrary to the history of consolidation within this industry and others. Picking a collection of best of breed software components is asking way, way, way too much of the vast majority of users, who mainly had a specific set of goals, one of the most important of which is to get on with the rest of life. About the best that can be achieved with this sort of software architecture is add on components that fill specific gaps in existing suites (and then likely get rolled into the suites themselves).

sorry, how that change our sympathy to the phrasing exactly?

The whole point of having users captive, is that you can offer the crappiest option and charge for it. And by charging for it you restrict who (and how) have access to it.

I still like what I wrote initially: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27107735

The tl;dr is that this architecture imposed costs on essentially everybody involved in software and offered benefits that were abstract at best. I didn't always see the costs, and I placed too much value on what I perceived to be the benefits.

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