Comment by mike_hearn

OLE has been dead for decades, yes. When was the last time a new app launched and being embeddable in Office documents via OLE was a key advertised feature? I don't know what even happens if you open a .docx with an embedded OLE object in Word Online.

Obviously the APIs are still there. You can use them if you want. It's just that nobody is writing pure/native win32 apps anymore, outside of browsers and legacy codebases. So, new code isn't being written as OLE controls.

I don't think Jobs killed OpenDoc because of some vision of an ecosystem of Apple's apps. At the time he made that decision Apple was on death's door because it had a culture of architecture astronauts spending years in front of whiteboards, writing features that didn't directly appeal to what the market wanted. He killed many projects at that time for the same reasons, like their line of printers.

If OpenDoc/OLE had been genuinely the right path we'd have seen people outside of MS/Apple try to reinvent them. Plenty of companies have the resources, as does the open source community. In fact KDE and GNOME both did try with KParts and Bonobo. But, both of those are dead too.

To your wider point, yes, it's often the case that what the app developers need/want is in conflict with what the users need want. I don't see that as a problem. Trade always involves tradeoffs, when users and developers trade there is always an implicit negotiation in the background. Sometimes that negotiation falls more on user freedoms and sometimes users choose to give up those freedoms to get other things they want. That's just trade, it's been true since before humans had writing. I don't think there's anything unique or special in computing in that regard.