Document-centric workflows were once the great promise of the future, and inspired Microsoft's OLE, Apple's "Publish and Subscribe", and then OpenDoc.

I remember reading a computing magazine in the early 1990s that promised a future where we would decompose applications and the OS would only really worry about a file, and you would bring functionality to the file.

You would in essence be able to build your own perfect word processing environment (for example), by bringing Company X's editing tools, Company Y's grammar checking and spelling tools, perhaps some embedded spreadsheet tables from Company Z if you were writing business reports, and so on.

We kind of have this a little today with browser extensions, in that we can extend functionality onto a webpage we're viewing, but our environments are still very application-centric and not workflow or content-centric at all.

This article shows an application that _might_ be interesting (and the CRDT is a mandatory requirement in today's environment), but while the OSes we use require us to do this sort of work in a windowed application, it won't quite appeal to me as having the full potential.

I often think back to that article as it made me quite excited about the future of user interfaces and how operating systems could support workflows tailored to the individual and the task they wanted to achieve. This was all in a time when we had moderately novel ideas in OSes popping up (Windows NT, OS/2 Warp, NeXT, etc.), and just before the web was starting to get popular.