Oh oh, another O/T discussion, and here I go headlong into it......
>
>Let me put this to rest. There is one major problem with the component
>concept, and the major hurdle that killed OpenDoc--memory. When you have
>within the document, both the data and the concept of the editor, you
>quickly run out of memory. Sure, you are fine if you stick to a simple
>document, but when you start adding components to a document, it quickly
>starts consuming memory, or at least OpenDoc did, and soon you have one
>document that is hogging system resources and simple tasks such as scrolling
>become a major ordeal.
I used to be a beta tester for WAV and really thought OpenDoc had a good
future. You are correct, memory was a problem, but with a modern OS (X)
and cheap memory such as we have now, the system could have worked. It
was buggy because it was really still beta as were many of the apps
written for it. But, like the 128K Mac, it had promise. It died because
Apple was in the throes of a death spiral, too many projects and not
enough emphasis on any one thing. It, along with many other projects
(the Newton comes to mind), could not be supported when a company that
had sold $11B in sales one year slipped to $6B the next. The press had
all but put Apple into its grave at that point and suggested that it was
a matter of time before it went belly up. If '97 Apple had the resources
of a Microsoft (and their ability to execute) they would have focused on
OpenDoc and made it work. It was almost working when they Gil killed it.
Like the Newton, other tried to buy it or even make it work for free if
Apple would release the source code, but like the Newton, Apple refused
to give up anything to anyone.
Mark Ross
markross13_at_home.com
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