Ray Ozzie describes Saving the browser
Interesting, and includes this loverly line:
I am quite embarassed to say that we frankly didn’t “get” what was so innovative about this newfangled “Web” thing, given the capabilities of what had already been built.
He wasn't the only one - I spent my early days of dealing with the web (1994/5) thinking "crikes this is primitive" - though that being primitive has largely what as led to its success; there're ain't much more openess than plain text commands whizzing around everywhere rather than difficult to unpick (proprietory) binary data structures, but I digress.
My problem with Mr Ozzie's contribution is that, IMHO, he does little more than demonstrate OLE:
In essence, the linked-to document we’re about to open has embedded CD records that describe 1) that an object is to be embedded into the page, 2) the class of object (in this case “EXCEL”), 3) the pointer to the object (in this case X:TEST.XLS”, which is a reference to a spreadsheet object that is potentially on a remote server computer represented by drive letter X., and 4) a parameter indicating whether or not this object should be immediately activated upon browsing, or whether the object needs to be double-clicked before activation.
The patent document describes that OLE/OpenDoc exist and that they are not prior-art for the patent (inability to work over the network). As I've said before - I don't see how this is so, and all Mr Ozzie's article does is say to me, yep, OLE/OpenDoc is what this patent is about. I don't understand the US patent system (soon to be in a European country near you - gawd help us).
posted at: 1:47:58 PM 
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