🚀 go-pugleaf

all:

IBM must be licking its wounds from its many, many, many failed software
initiatives.  Ad OpenDoc to the list of "great IBM technology; zero IBM support."

(I wonder how the myriad of IBM software developers feel about designing
superior technologies only to have their top managers to blunder 
opportunity after opportunity at pushing these products onto the market place)

-Kevin

               
Source: http://www.pcweek.com/news/0310/14eopen.html                  




                   March 14, 1997 6:00 PM ET 
                   Requiem for OpenDoc
                   By Norvin Leach

                    
                            At the June 1995 PC Expo in New York, Apple Computer Inc.'s
                            Gilbert Amelio, Novell Inc.'s Robert Frankenberg and IBM's John M.
                            Thompson stood together on a stage asserting their commitment to
                            OpenDoc and proclaiming it was key to the future of their companies.

                            The presentation, full of warmth and promise, was supposed to feature
                            a demonstration of interoperable OpenDoc parts across Windows,
                            OS/2 and the Macintosh.

                            Unfortunately, the setup wasn't working correctly.

                            The demo's intractability, combined with the boiling heat of a New
                            York summer and the accumulated pressure of preparing for the
                            show, was too much for one of the demonstrators. She fainted on stage.
                            The rest of the crew used that as a convenient excuse, claiming that
                            the demo didn't work because she'd pulled out a power cord. 

                            But the crash was a bad omen. OpenDoc had peaked and was on its
                            way down, culminating in today's decision by Apple to discontinue the
                            product past Version 8.0 of the Macintosh operating system.

                            It didn't seem that way on the surface. The OpenDoc consortium
                            appeared to be just as solid as it had been back in the fall of 1993, when
                            IBM, Apple and Novell first announced the compound-document
                            architecture.

                            Granted, a few of the key partners had failed to follow through with
                            their announced support-Oracle Corp. was cautious and quiet, Lotus
                            Development Corp. supported only pieces of the technology, and
                            Borland International Inc. was nowhere to be seen.

                            Still, a series of seminars and road shows during 1994 had whipped up
                            enthusiasm among hundreds of small developers-the same customer
                            base that had made Microsoft's VBX controls so popular.

                            OpenDoc was a neat, elegant architecture. In head-to-head debates,
                            the audiences clearly favored the non-Microsoft solution. And the
                            demonstrations grew more and more sophisticated and flashy each
                            month.

                            But underneath, the development effort was resting on shaky ground.
                            Novell, overburdened with technology from its corporate acquisitions,
                            refused to commit significant resources to building its part of the
                            architecture.

                            And the Novell part, the link to Microsoft's OLE, was vital for
                            OpenDoc's future. Without OLE interoperability, OpenDoc would
                            remain a marginal technology.

                            Meanwhile, OS/2, which was to spearhead the growth of OpenDoc,
                            was not succeeding as well as IBM had hoped. A brief, flashy attempt
                            at pushing OS/2 into the consumer market failed, and IBM fell back on
                            selling the product to its more stable corporate base.

                            By the time of the PC Expo demonstration, a year and a half after the
                            unveiling, the code wasn't finished, true Windows interoperability was
                            many months away and, perhaps worst of all, there were no simple,
                            readily available tools to build OpenDoc applets or assemble them into
                            compound documents. By comparison, the success of the VBX can be
                            attributed to the simplicity and availability of Visual Basic.

                            In short, the development of OpenDoc had not kept up with its
                            marketing.

                            A few months after PC Expo, Novell dropped its OpenDoc efforts.
                            IBM took over the development, only to discover that Novell had
                            barely started working on the code. In the fall of 1995, after reviewing
                            what Novell had turned over, IBM announced that it would take more
                            than a year to release a final version.

                            At that point, developers began to look elsewhere. Many of the
                            hard-core proponents of OpenDoc were small companies that could
                            no longer afford to wait for the technology. And larger corporate
                            customers, such as U.S. Trust, gave up in frustration when IBM failed
                            to deliver technology on a consistent schedule.

                            In 1996, the development world shifted its attention to Java and the
                            Web. OpenDoc's concept of compound documents had not taken the
                            Web into consideration, and it took some scrambling on the part of the
                            marketing teams to reposition the technology.

                            Although Apple showed OpenDoc's flexibility by building the
                            CyberDog browser, that browser never caught on. It looked flashy,
                            but Netscape Communications Corp. was too well entrenched.

                            By the fall of 1996, the end was obvious. In October, John M.
                            Thompson repudiated the technology, saying that OpenDoc had not
                            ridden the Internet wave effectively. He suggested that the
                            technology should be cannibalized and included in the JavaBeans
                            object framework.



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