Customer is actually doing as much work as experience in that beautifully apt & precise phrase.

For developers, the idea of being able to build and sell a little specialized widget of functionality—the best spellchecker ever made—had obvious appeal. It might even provide a truly outstanding experience for users. But where would you find a customer excited about assembling their own word processor out of a dozen independently purchased components?

One of the best pieces of advice I have been given is “design for people who aren’t you”. Turns out, the vast majority of people want something that “just works” and involves no configuration or in-depth understanding. That’s not a bad thing, either.

I mean spellcheck might actually make a lot of sense (if the hooks were appropriate). The interface is mostly set, but the word list and how you figure out if words in the document are correct have a lot of potential variation. Selling the product seems like a lot of work though. Maybe if you could add spell check in a language not included in the box, that would have at least a chance regionally.

But things that are maybe even more potentially useful like math formula editors get really hairy if you want to share documents. Then people viewing the customer's documents might need a special viewer or a licensed copy of the editor if they want to adjust things. It's a big mess.

Yeah given user's goal with a doc is to ... communicate or otherwise do a thing. Working WITH the doc, picking components, or picking among a bunch of document editors, thinking about document technology is not their goal.

in all fariness, B2B is a perfectly viable business model. If you don't or can't care about the UX, sell the hard work making the tech to some company that has those UX engineers to make that spell checker "just work". other companies are very happy to pay devs to put those components together (and serving a dev struggling with an API is likely easier than a user struggling with the UX).

Yeah I've 'fixed' things now and then and sat back and clicked some buttons and watched it work only to realize that really ... I was clicking the same buttons getting the same thing just like it was before and getting roughly the same output / experience.

I wasn't wrong, some stuff needed to get fixed and it was better, but the customer's experience really didn't get much better... not a lot changed.

I was thinking tech first and working towards the customer experience ... didn't have much to show for the effort when I put it all together.

I've also been really excited about a solution only to realize that my excitement was with the underlying technology rather than the customer experience.

I remember this feeling with early web apps. I was excited about being able to update one system rather than several desktops. For the customer, however, the overall UX was actually a slight step down because of the limitations of HTML and javascript.

I watched this video more than a dozen times over the years and never realized he was talking about OpenDoc haha

Lol how? It's the main thrust of the question and the answer as well???

There isn't anything specific to OpenDoc in there. The real question is "why did you kill this technology that I loved" and the answer could apply to any such case.

I had a real soft spot for OpenDoc, remembering seeing the demos at AppleExpo in the late 90's.

Yes you have to start with what people need and go from there. However, you can also start from what a niche of people need and go from there.

Honestly I think OpenDoc was way too ahead of its time to be groked by mainstream users. Currently we have various workbook online apps (like Observable) that are similar in spirit and super useful to those who know how to leverage them, but haven't yet crossed into the mainstream.

I can understand this. I've been enamored with good engineering many a time, and it has its place. Something that's well engineered often WANTS to be a good solution. But I also agree with the concept of starting with "where can I take the customer" rather "how can I present this awesome new technology".

Another variation on this concept was an article by Joel Spolsky in which he coined the term "Architecture Astronauts". He describes well the manner in which an architecture astronaut looks at something like Napster and generalizes to peer-to-peer messaging while missing the excitement of "search for song. find song.".

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

You see it time and again where a X clone shows up and you use it and realize ... the clone has no soul and none of the convince or emotion that what it tries to copy has. It copies the notes but can't put a song together.

Oh, do you happen to remember this OpenDoc vs OLE (with Gates) t-shirt?

https://www.depop.com/products/chard_on-vintage-microsoft-op...

I went to a big computer trade show at Jacob Javitz center in the 90s and got this same shirt.

On a side note, my memory of OpenDoc isn't as rosy as others. It was very slow and memory hog, when memory cost was astronomical. Use cases was too niche for ordinary users.

You never tried to use CyberDog…

I've seen this video a few times now, and what's amazing about it is that Jobs freely admits he doesn't even really know what OpenDoc was really all about as he goes on this presentation. It's nicely presented, but frankly I think it was off target. I would be pissed if I was the questioner who initiated it (though the questioner was very rude)

As I see it, OpenDoc's entire purpose was to benefit the user, as it put the focus on the user's intent and document rather than on the applications used to assemble it. The person who would have struggled to see the benefit was the application publishing houses, not the user. So I think this is all a bit disingenuous. There was a clear user benefit to something like OpenDoc, and frankly I think the era where Jobs returns to Apple is in fact the turning point where Apple went from an end-user focused company ("the computer for the rest of us") to a lifestyle/luxury-branding company.

That obviously has given them far better financial success, but has it benefited the world like Jobs liked to pontificate?

Frankly, what it comes down to is this: OpenDoc had no home at Apple, because the return of Jobs was not just a management transplant from NeXT to Apple, but a tech one as well, and Jobs & Tevanian etc. wanted to replace/supplant MacOS with what they had developed at NeXT. Like the Newton and other tech, OpenDoc was something innovated at Apple during the years while he was exiled. So it had to go and be replaced with whatever the NeXTstep/OpenStep world would want instead.

There's an excellent comment on that YouTube video, which I thought was insightful:

"Watch Ramblings 9 months ago (edited) This was actually a fairly disastrous response from Steve Jobs that really hurt the company. This was 1997, more than a decade before the iPhone, and the Apple Macintosh (the company's sole product) was in bad shape. The questioner here was referring to the fact that Apple had just pulled the plug on support for OpenDoc, a cross-platform software framework for creating complex documents. Many developers (such as the questioner) had devoted years to the OpenDoc technology and made a livelihood developing applications for it since 1992, and thought Jobs abruptly dropped the technology without good reason. The questioner was asking, dude, why did you pull it? Jobs' response was basically, tough shit, no answer. Developers learned that technologies that were sacred to Apple one year could be dropped the next without cause or warning, so many devs concluded the investment wasn't worth it and abandoned the Macintosh platform in droves. The market share for the Macintosh would drop by more than 50% over the next two years as the (few) remaining developers who were loyal to the Macintosh platform fled to the greener pastures of Windows. People look at this response with rose colored glasses because of what Apple would become many, many years later, but this was actually a very poor way to respond to a legit question (although posed angrily) from the type of developers that Apple really needed to keep happy."

I think Steve jobs was mainly looking at the cost vs potential profits of Opendoc. There was a lot of ongoing engineering money going into development, and the potential revenue streams seemed too niche for the amount of effort. From his perspective it was better to move the talent to more strategic projects that matched his 5-10 year vision. He wanted to pivot to chasing end users, not to expanding the existing developer base. In the long run it worked, with a lot of short term pain.

> As I see it, OpenDoc's entire purpose was to benefit the user, as it put the focus on the user's intent and document rather than on the applications used to assemble it.

That was the purpose, and I wish we had a real instance of that vision today but OpenDoc was never going to deliver.

> This was actually a fairly disastrous response from Steve Jobs that really hurt the company.

Not really. It was much better than lying, and appearing to support OpenDoc only to drop it later would have been far worse for the developers who would have invested been more into it and Apple.