[cphoover]

Everyone is cheering this on... But as far as I can tell Apple did not win the Document Editor and business computing war vs MS.

Microsoft clearly won with the Microsoft Office Suite and Microsoft Word... I'm not sure about this specific tech or if OpenDoc would have made any difference... But is it an impossibility that open standards could have been a strong weapon against MS market dominance?

Either way the man is undeniably a legendary public speaker.

[carbocation]

I don't think people are cheering this on because the business decision led to product victory.

I think people are cheering this on because he gave a really thoughtful answer to an aggressive question, and how he did it is worth thinking about.

[dmix]

> A serious problem with the OpenDoc project that Cyberdog depended on, was that it was part of a very acrimonious competition between OpenDoc consortium members and Microsoft. The members of the OpenDoc alliance were all trying to obtain traction in a market rapidly being dominated by Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. At the same time, Microsoft used the synergy between the OS and applications divisions of the company to make it effectively mandatory that developers adopt the competing Microsoft Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technology. OpenDoc was forced to create an interoperability layer in order to allow developers to use it, and this added a great technical burden to the project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cyberdog