Writing about XDocs (err, InfoPath), Jon Udell says:
10. It represents a paradigm shift.Hmm. We've heard this story before. Bento/OpenDoc was an open standard that provided the same idea long before people started putting all of their data into angle brackets and automatically assumed that everyone else could read that data fresh off the bench. Sigh. Killing OpenDoc right as it was gaining traction is, in my opinion, Apple's biggest mistake (or, at least, their biggest sin). Mac OS X has a lot of really cool little applications, which I like. There are small but very effective applications like NetNewsWire, OmniOutliner, BBEdit, etc, and in general there are good inter-application communications in OS X (ie - being able to pick up an RSS feed in NetNewsWire, command-tab to switch to Spring while still holding the RSS feed with the mouse, and dropping a news feed onto a Spring Canvas), but it could always be better - I would love to be able to natively host an OmniGraffle drawing in OmniOutliner, or even to use BBEdit from within NetNewsWire's weblog editor, and that was all possible back in 1997, but in the exciting new operating systems of today - it's not!
I try to avoid the "P" phrase. But there is no other way to describe InfoPath. At the dawn of the .Net era, Bill Gates introduced the notion of a "universal canvas" -- a viewing and editing surface for anything that can be represented in XML. InfoPath isn't that yet, but it's a huge step in the right direction. [Udell, Jon, "Ten things to know about XDocs", InfoWorld Feb 20 2003]
I did just make the argument that Apple did the right thing by not exploring any massive new operating paradigm's in Mac OS X. But at the same time, it's sad that now I look at Windows for the best in theoretical operating environment experiments. And always, Windows botches it. Cool ideas, mediocre execution (at best). I look back to 1988 to 1994 as the last good years of operating system planning. It's when Pink/Taligent, Cairo, Copland/Gershwin, OS/2 2.0+, etc, were in the works.
I hope that now that the Mac OS X transition has been made and the foundation is there that some exciting new developments can occur in this space that keep the simplicity of OS X's interface in mind while improving the way we work with our machines.