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Then there were Apple and IBM's two joint ventures: Taligent and Kaleida (where I worked on ScriptX until it shut down).

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk4N5kkifGQ

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC

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).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlrsqGal64w

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_Object_Model

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog

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 saying no."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8eP99neOVs

Q: What about OpenDoc?

Jobs: What about OpenDoc??! (nods)

Q: Yeah.

Jobs: Yeah. (sips) (smirks) (leans) What about it?

Q: (laughs) Ooooh nooo!!!

Jobs: It's dead, right?

Q: Huh??!

Jobs: It's dead, right? (nods)

Q: Oh, I don't know, I spent a lot of time working on it. And it kind of makes me sad.

Jobs: (shakes) Yeah? (stands) Well, let me say something that's sort of generic. (paces and gestures) I know a lot of you spent a lot of time working on stuff that we put a bullet in the head of. I apologize. (opens hands) I feel your pain. (genuflects)

(prays) But Apple suffered for several years from no, from lousy engineering management, I have to say it. (applause)

There were people who were going off in eighteen different directions, doing arguable interesting things in each one of them. Good engineers. Lousy management. (slouches)

And what happened is you look at the farm that has been created with all these different animals going in different directions (crucifies arms), and it doesn't add up (bends over). The total is less than the sum of the parts.

(prays) So we had to decide what are the fundamental directions we're going in, and what makes sense, and what doesn't. And there were a bunch of things that didn't. And microcosmically they might have made sense, macrocosmically they made no sense. (waves arms)

(prays) And you know the hardest thing is, when you think about focusing (fists), right, focusing is saying yes! No. (palms out) Focusing is about saying no. (palms down) Focusing is about saying no. (emphasizes)

And you've got to say no, no, no. (chops) And when you say no, you piss off people. (points finger) And they go talk to the San Jose Mercury, and they write a shitty article about you, you know? (spreads hands) And it's really a pisser.

Because you want to be nice, you don't want to tell the San Jose Mercury the person who's telling you this (holds out hand), you know, just was asked to leave, or this or that, it was that, so you take the lumps.

And Apple's been taking their lumps for the last six months (chops), in a very unfair way (spreads hands). And it's been taking them, you know (fists), like an adult. And I'm proud of that (pulls up sleeves). And there's more to come (spreads arms), I'm sure. There's more to come.

Some of these -- I read these articles about some of these people who have left. I know some of these people. They haven't done anything in seven years. And you know, they leave (waves hand), and it's like the company's going to fall apart the next day (shrugs).

And so I think (hands on hips) there'll be stories like that that come and go (pulls up pants), but focus is about saying no (Clinton thumb).

And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products, where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts (chops).

And OpenDoc... I was for putting a bullet in the head of OpenDoc. A: I didn't think it was great technology. But B: it didn't fit (shrugs). The rest of the world wasn't going to use OpenDoc.

And I think as a container strategy (hand on chin), there's some stuff in the Java space that's much better. And even the OpenDoc guys were trying to were trying to basically rewrite the whole thing in Java anyway (waves hands), which was a restart (shrugs). So it didn't make sense (hands on hips).