"Focusing is about saying no" - Steve Jobs (WWDC'97)

That was the vision of OpenDoc, and the component based CyberDog web browser that Apple built with it. link >OpenDoc is a defunct multi-platform software componentry framework standard created by Apple in the 1990s for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's proprietary Object Linking and Embedding (OLE).[1] It is one of Apple's earliest experiments with open standards and collaborative development methods with other companies. OpenDoc development was transferred to the non-profit Component Integration Laboratories, Inc. (CI Labs), owned by a growing team of major corporate backers and effectively starting an industry consortium. In 1992, the historic AIM alliance launched between Apple, IBM, and Motorola—with OpenDoc as a foundation. With the return of Steve Jobs to Apple, OpenDoc was discontinued in March 1997. [...] >After three years of development on OpenDoc itself, the first OpenDoc-based product release was Apple's CyberDog web browser in May 1996. The second was on August 1, 1996, of IBM's two packages of OpenDoc components for OS/2, available on the Club OpenDoc website for a 30 day free trial: the Person Pak is "components aimed at organizing names, addresses, and other personal information", for use with personal information management (PIM) applications, at $229; and the Table Pak "to store rows and columns in a database file" at $269. IBM then anticipated the release of 50 more components by the end of 1996.[7] WWDC 1996 Cyberdog demo link Steve Jobs put a bullet in Open Doc's head, and defended his decision at WWDC '97: link “Focusing is about saying no.” -Steve Jobs, WWDC ‘97 As sad as it was, Steve Jobs was right to “put a bullet in OpenDoc’s head”. Jobs explained (and performed) his side of the story in this fascinating and classic WWDC’97 video: “Focusing is about saying no.” "Focusing is about saying no" - Steve Jobs (WWDC'97) ▶ this video Steve Jobs Insult Response - Highest Quality link >Steve Jobs handling a tough question at the 1997 Worldwide Developer Conference. He had just returned to Apple as an advisor and was guiding sweeping change at the company. The full video is here - [original video taken down by Apple - new link: link ] - this interactions is at 50:25. I highly recommend taking the time to watch the entire WWDC 1997 video -- it is historically profound. Steve Jobs walked on stage and announced he wanted to take questions from the audience, right after his return to Apple from NeXT and the sweeping changes he made. Some of the best most difficult questions really made him stop and think before speaking, and he delivered frank fascinating answers. We all know what happened next, but it's amazing to hear how deeply and confidently he thought about it before it happened. WWDC 1997: Steve Jobs about Apple's future: link >Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in the San Jose Convention Center (May 13-16) was the first show after the purchase of NeXT, and focused on the efforts to use OpenStep as the foundation of the next Mac OS. The plan at that time was to introduce a new system then known as Rhapsody, which would consist of a version of OpenStep modified with a more Mac-like look and feel, the Yellow Box, along with a Blue Box that allowed existing Mac applications to run under OS emulation. >The show focused primarily on the work in progress, including a short history of the development efforts since the two development teams had been merged on February 4. Several new additions to the system were also demonstrated, including tabbed and outline views, and a new object-based graphics layer (NSBezier). Source: wikipedia.org

Then there were Apple and IBM's two joint ventures: Taligent and Kaleida (where I worked on ScriptX until it shut down). link link link Working at Kaleida was like having parents who couldn't get along and argued all the time, so no hard decisions ever actually got made. ScriptX supported QuickTime on MacOS, Windows and OS/2, but Apple was shy about IBM and other companies having access to the source code. IBM desperately wanted everyone to use and love OS/2 (so they renamed it Warp so the cool kids would dig it), while Taligent was tasked at solving the problem of Apple's shitty operating system. Taligent also had their own weird incompatible object model, as well as CommonPoint's "people, places and things" metaphor, which they shamelessly ripped off from Schoolhouse Rock. link CHRP was the Common Hardware Reference Platform for the PowerPC, which IBM and Apple collaborated on. IBM made a CHRP PowerPC Thinkpad that ran OS/2, but out of pride refused to sell one that ran MacOS, which kind of missed the whole point of CHRP. IBM just couldn't imagine why anyone would want to run anything but OS/2 on them. I would have loved to have a MacOS powerbook running on wonderful Thinkpad hardware, because Apple's laptop hardware was pretty crappy at the time. It would have been the best of both worlds, but it was never to be. link And then there was OpenDoc. There were actually two different incompatible implementations of OpenDoc, one from Apple on MacOS and one from IBM on OS/2, and they didn't talk to each other (which kind of missed the entire point). link IBM was shipping a bunch of OpenDoc stuff on OS/2 (Eric The Half-an-OS), and used it themselves, but nobody else wanted to use OpenDoc or even OS/2, despite their extensive advertising campaign and Warp re-branding attempt. link IBM's implementation of SOM (System Object Model), which their implementation of OpenDoc was built on top of, required that you use IBM's C++ compiler to get special optimizations, otherwise every message send was quite expensive. link Apple had their own implementation of OpenDoc that used their own compiler, and wasn't compatible with IBM's. Apple used their version of OpenDoc to create CyberDoc, a component oriented web browser, which was extremely cool and flexible, but didn't go anywhere unfortunately, even though it was a brilliant approach. link At the time, CHRP and Open Doc were supposed to be "the future", but in reality, neither Apple nor IBM really had their shit together nor were serious about swallowing their pride and getting along well enough to develop products that actually shared the same technology and plugged together and synergized as well as they promised. It would have been wonderful if both Apple and IBM followed through with their plans to their full potential: A CHRP PowerPC ThinkPad laptop running MacOS, OpenDoc and CyberDog! Kaleida missed the boat on CyberDog, but was around OpenDoc early enough to go through the motions of adopting its Bento file format (FWTW), but never did anything with OpenDoc itself (neither Apple's or IBM's). The fact that there were two incompatible versions of OpenDoc on different operating systems, and ScriptX was meant to run on both, made that kind of difficult to impossible. OpenDoc required huge amounts of memory, and so did ScriptX, which had its own totally different object model (like Dylan + CLOS), so it just wouldn't have been practical at the time. As sad as it was, Steve Jobs was right to "put a bullet in OpenDoc's head". Jobs explained (and performed) his side of the story in this fascinating and classic WWDC'97 video: "Focusing is about