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There isn't much argument in my mind who wins the OLE/COM vs. OpenDoc war. Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) beats out its rival from both a business and technical standpoint, so much so that this war is a pointless waste of time and effort.
The advantages of using OLE include a clear evolutionary path from today' s most popular personal productivity applications to "componentware." And its distributed Common Object Model (COM) provides a path to distributed objects.
Both OLE/COM and OpenDoc have the goal of facilitating componentware--that is, software modules from multiple vendors that can be assembled to create applications. The idea is to let users access different application tools in the same document. Both technologies use software objects, and both plan to provide support for distributed objects.
But while OpenDoc is still in its infancy--source code is just now shipping--OLE has been out there since the spring of 1991. OLE is available on Windows, Windows NT and Mac OS.
Think of it this way. If you're a technical manager in a large user organization, what would you bet on: newly minted (do I dare say untried?) OpenDoc, or OLE, complete with its Microsoft Corp. clout and installed base of Windows developers? About 60,000 OLE software developer's kits were shipped before the kits were bundled with Visual C/C++, and many more have gone out since then.
OLE 2.0 also has the force of hundreds of independent software vendors creating user products; at Comdex/Fall 1994, Microsoft's developers list...