Re:Why did OpenDoc fail, and then fail 3 more times?
by lastofthemojito on Monday May 10, 2021 @12:40PM
(#27107941)
> The hardware wasn't there:
...
> The average Mac had about 2 megabytes of memory. OpenDoc wouldn’t run on a machine with less than 4 megs, and realistically, 8 megs was probably what you wanted.
Maybe I'm misreading this but this feels like a focus on the neat technology rather than what the user gets out of the technology. Sure, OpenDoc was cool component-based stuff, but if someone's 2MB Mac runs Word or MacWrite or whatever just fine, they aren't going to upgrade their hardware to run your OpenDoc-based word processor. Oh, but I could embed a QuickTime component in my text document? What does that even mean? When I print my document, I get to see a blurry postage-stamp sized video thumbnail in my document? Hoo boy!
...
> The average Mac had about 2 megabytes of memory. OpenDoc wouldn’t run on a machine with less than 4 megs, and realistically, 8 megs was probably what you wanted.
Maybe I'm misreading this but this feels like a focus on the neat technology rather than what the user gets out of the technology. Sure, OpenDoc was cool component-based stuff, but if someone's 2MB Mac runs Word or MacWrite or whatever just fine, they aren't going to upgrade their hardware to run your OpenDoc-based word processor. Oh, but I could embed a QuickTime component in my text document? What does that even mean? When I print my document, I get to see a blurry postage-stamp sized video thumbnail in my document? Hoo boy!