As I see it, OpenDoc's entire purpose was to benefit the user, as it put the focus on the user's intent and document rather than on the applications used to assemble it. The person who would have struggled to see the benefit was the application publishing houses, not the user. So I think this is all a bit disingenuous. There was a clear user benefit to something like OpenDoc, and frankly I think the era where Jobs returns to Apple is in fact the turning point where Apple went from an end-user focused company ("the computer for the rest of us") to a lifestyle/luxury-branding company.
That obviously has given them far better financial success, but has it benefited the world like Jobs liked to pontificate?
Frankly, what it comes down to is this: OpenDoc had no home at Apple, because the return of Jobs was not just a management transplant from NeXT to Apple, but a tech one as well, and Jobs & Tevanian etc. wanted to replace/supplant MacOS with what they had developed at NeXT. Like the Newton and other tech, OpenDoc was something innovated at Apple during the years while he was exiled. So it had to go and be replaced with whatever the NeXTstep/OpenStep world would want instead.
There's an excellent comment on that YouTube video, which I thought was insightful:
"Watch Ramblings 9 months ago (edited) This was actually a fairly disastrous response from Steve Jobs that really hurt the company. This was 1997, more than a decade before the iPhone, and the Apple Macintosh (the company's sole product) was in bad shape. The questioner here was referring to the fact that Apple had just pulled the plug on support for OpenDoc, a cross-platform software framework for creating complex documents. Many developers (such as the questioner) had devoted years to the OpenDoc technology and made a livelihood developing applications for it since 1992, and thought Jobs abruptly dropped the technology without good reason. The questioner was asking, dude, why did you pull it? Jobs' response was basically, tough shit, no answer. Developers learned that technologies that were sacred to Apple one year could be dropped the next without cause or warning, so many devs concluded the investment wasn't worth it and abandoned the Macintosh platform in droves. The market share for the Macintosh would drop by more than 50% over the next two years as the (few) remaining developers who were loyal to the Macintosh platform fled to the greener pastures of Windows. People look at this response with rose colored glasses because of what Apple would become many, many years later, but this was actually a very poor way to respond to a legit question (although posed angrily) from the type of developers that Apple really needed to keep happy."