[davidy123]

"Great artists steal." Jobs identified an overall vision that was something like "to sell great technology." This later became refined into something that was a little "different" as Apple latched onto the "better alternative" image when confronted with clone PCs.

Jobs was always on the lookout for selling points, the "one more thing." But the impact of objects as a selling point through NeXT and WebObjects on Apple's consumer-focused tech is only skin deep, because creating a comprehensive system would have taken much longer, but it was enough for Jobs to impress people, and provide an essence of an advantage. This was clear in at least early versions of OSX (I haven't used OSX for years), where drag and drop between identifiable objects worked… sometimes. The remaining functionality would have been much harder to achieve, and would have meant something really significant was being built, rather than what became a current generational marketing push. The idea of an object oriented system isn't talked about much anymore, and Apple really focuses on Raskins' ideas for interface, which aren't really compatible since it focuses on one object at a time, rather than a system of objects.

[azinman2]

As CS people who love uniformity and abstraction, this idea of objects everywhere is very appealing. But concretely, what actually are you restricted from doing today? I question the tangible executions of this into a variety of everyday examples versus one or two talking points.

[davidy123]

Being able to easily use the data from one application in another. Being able to learn one set of digital tools and apply them to nearly any task (copy and paste being an example). I don't think you have to be a basement dweller to see benefits from these, and there are others.

[azinman2]

Ad hominem aside, can we dig in to this? What application data are you want it to put into something else and you currently can’t? All major office suites already let you embed between their apps, so what non-office suite task are you trying to accomplish? And once you’ve done it, how do you figure you’re supposed to interact with it? Does the native application UI now need to morph to this unrelated object?

We’ve had object technologies before in mainstream environments (OpenDoc, COM), and yet they’re effectively dead today. They were very complex, and the main pathways can be explicitly supported with better UX when the target apps are written with what’s supported in mind.

[Aloha]

Jobs used a very Walt Disney like approach, he was always plussing, and looking for a weenie in the products he worked on.