apple cancelled Kaleida (a joint venture with IBM) in the mid-90′s cuz the suits cod not imagine a marketspace for online interactivity.

like so much of the other intellectual property at apple hat has been squandered by Steve Jobs when he returned in ’97 (also cancelling the ground-breaking Newton pda, then reversing himself by trying to buy the Palm PDA, then being forced to play defensive catch-up by slapping together the iPhone) … apple could have had a ten year lead in multimedia if Steve Jobs had not so hastily squandered the kaleida investment in a nex-gen object-oriented media platform!

indeed Jobs even spiked a consolidatation (albeit scaled-back version) of it’s existing media/interactive assets (QuickTime + hypercard) literally just months before it’s scheduled roll-out! In doing so, Jobs also eliminated apple’s chance to just keep up with advances (kaleida would have been the leap-frogging game-changer).

apple has simply been lucky/fortunate that it’s competitors have always been so dumb & slow that apple can afford to sit out of a market for a decade and not be decimated along the way!

kaleida RIP.

ps: kaleida was by no means perfect – eg the insanely stupid choices of building it’s own object model that missed two key points: a) it was redundent reinvention of the wheel because its own in-house objects-in-c duplicated what objectiveC could have delivered off-the-shelf, with 10 years of production-quality experience at nextstep under it’s belt; and b) the total lack of planning for integration with SOMobjects, the far superior runtime from IBM that was at the heart apple’s own opendoc component model.

these and many other management flaws created obstacles for kaleida’s success – but instead of recognizing the chance to seize strategic advantage by fixing them, Jobs simply allowed apple’s media technogy to drift/coast for a decade.

1) from the USER perspective, it would be great if Flash could just disappear into a black hole. 99% of Flash (excluding YouTube) seems to be devoted to increasingly annoying and intrusive ads.

2) YouTube seems to be heading towards H.264. H.264 (and to a lesser extent, its bastard cousin, DiVX) are magnificent codecs.

3) You can do a whole heck of a lot via AJAX; javascript, CSS, HTML. Look at Flickr– they use no Flash, but have an incredibly rich, cross-platform Web 2.0 community.

4) Scripting languages are a security risj

5) Silverlight is a a non-starter; web development is done on Macintoshes and there is no SDK for Silverlight on the Mac. MSFT can be phenomenally stupid sometimes. Did I say “sometimes”? Furthermore, it has no advantages over Flash. Redmond cultists will, no doubt, tell you that version 3 will bake cookies for you and will bring about the Second Coming of Zoroaster, but let’s be serious. Sometimes a headstart– like we see with Flash gives you an advantage. During the MS-Netscape wars, MSFT tried adding all sorts of c**p to HTML. Almost nothing “stuck”. In fact, IE doesn’t even recognize decent CSS support even to this day– MSFt got in over their heads.

6)Did I mention H.264 was a REALLY good codec? And a recognized standard?

I haven’t seen any follow-up about it after that, but I expect it will be coming.

See for examples of what Apple are doing.

Yes, but could they lose the edge and yet gain the ground?