Tessa: Imagine you don't open an app. You just open a blank page. And if you want to write, you drag a little text box onto it. If you need a spreadsheet, you drag a spreadsheet box next to it. If you want to edit a photo, you drag that in too.
Tyler: And the text box is from one company, the spreadsheet from another, the photo editor from a third. All in one document.
Tessa: Exactly. The document is the app. That was the idea behind a project Apple started in the nineties called OpenDoc.
Tyler: That's basically the App Store, but for pieces of apps. And in the nineties. Apple must have been all-in on this, it sounds revolutionary.
Tessa: No, that's the tragedy of it. They were the opposite of all-in. At the same time they were telling developers to use OpenDoc, they were also telling them the real future was this other operating system called Taligent.
Tyler: Wait, what? So which one were you supposed to build for?
Tessa: Nobody knew! The official guidance was basically, use OpenDoc to port your old stuff, but build your new stuff on Taligent. And then, there was a third project called Bedrock that was also supposed to be the cross-platform future. Apple was competing with itself three times over.
Tyler: That's... a mess. How did anything get done?
Tessa: Well, the OpenDoc idea itself had huge momentum. This was all happening as Microsoft was pushing its own version, called OLE, for Object Linking and Embedding. You know, when you'd paste an Excel chart into Word? Apple wanted an open standard to compete, not a proprietary Microsoft one.
Tyler: So they teamed up with other companies to fight Microsoft. The classic story.
Tessa: And what a team. Apple, IBM, and Motorola formed the 'AIM alliance'. They created a non-profit lab to manage OpenDoc. And companies like WordPerfect and Novell signed on. Novell, which was a giant at the time, announced plans to break up its entire software suite into OpenDoc components.
Tyler: Okay, with IBM and Novell on board, this thing should have been unstoppable. They had the technical chops and the market power.
Tessa: It was even technically better than Microsoft's version. The IBM tech they used, DSOM, let you link these components across a network. OLE couldn't do that. So you could have a document on your Mac pulling live data from a component running on a server somewhere else.
Tyler: That's incredible for the mid-nineties. So what went wrong? Why am I not using OpenDoc right now?
Tessa: This is the part I honestly don't fully get. The Wikipedia article says that despite all these huge partners, very few OpenDoc components were ever actually released. Reception was 'mixed' and developers were 'confused'. But it's hard to square that with Novell saying they're betting their company on it. Something broke down between the announcement and the execution.
Tyler: And then Steve Jobs comes back to Apple in 1997.
Tessa: And one of the first things he does is kill OpenDoc.
Tyler: Ugh. That feels like a classic Jobs move, but it also feels like he killed a unicorn right before it learned to fly. The entire way we work now—with collaborative, modular tools like Notion or Figma—that's the OpenDoc vision. They had it thirty years ago.
Tessa: I don't know, was it a unicorn or a beautiful racehorse with three broken legs? Apple was reportedly weeks from bankruptcy when Jobs came back. They had a dozen different versions of the Mac, a product map that looked like a shotgun blast... He had to simplify. Killing ambitious, flailing projects wasn't a choice, it was triage.
Tyler: But the project was flailing because of the mismanagement before him. He didn't kill it because the idea was bad; he killed it because the company had made a complete mess of it. He just cleaned up by taking the most interesting thing in the room out back.
Tessa: Or maybe the idea was just too early. You need the web to be mature, you need fast networks, you need a different mindset. It's a great idea, but it's like designing a spaceship in the 1920s. You just don't have the materials yet.
Tyler: I'm not so sure. It feels like they were closer than anyone knew. A noble failure, maybe.
Tessa: Maybe it had to fail then so the idea could come back and succeed now. I'm Tessa.
Tyler: I'm Tyler.