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Comment by jccc | Hacker News Reader

Apple was barely above comatose, running on vapors. The point was that even OpenDoc being "better" tech does not automatically mean Apple could/should make it into products and sell those products to customers. Apple needed to invest rapidly diminishing resources into actual products it can sell to actual customers that would save the company from imminent death.

Whether you like, dislike, agree or disagree with that argument, I don't think it can be dismissed as "platitudes about 'people over tech.'"

Jobs had to make bird's-eye-view decisions, and articulated that point of view pretty well here.

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Agreed. The other serious problem with OpenDoc, from a business standpoint, is that it could have alienated big software vendors such as Microsoft and Adobe from Mac OS at a time when Apple needed Microsoft's and Adobe's commitment to providing Mac versions of Office and Photoshop/Illustrator. Indeed, they even balked at porting their applications to the OpenStep/Yellow Box/Cocoa API, which forced Apple to change its Rhapsody strategy and announce Carbon in 1998. But OpenDoc's component-based software model would have been an even greater disruption: Microsoft and Adobe might have balked at supporting a platform that would make it easier for upstarts to compete by selling components.

There's a nice Hacker News comment that is a repost of another comment that describes why OpenDoc didn't fit with Apple's business model and how the Linux desktop missed a big opportunity by not pursuing an OpenDoc-style approach to the Linux desktop in the mid-1990s when KDE was in its infancy:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373

KDE attempted to bring OpenDoc-lite style components into itself ~2000 with KParts, while Gnome attempted the same with the CORBA based Bonobo system at the same time. Neither was successful - the true path to inter operating compound documents was the Web with HTML and JavaScript ultimately, but that didn’t start coming into its own until about 10 years later.

At least the IPC idea survived with D-BUS, and they could actually still do it, but the elephant in the room is that desktop fragmentation in Linux world is a big obstacle.

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