Quote Originally Posted by Albacore
Now before you reply stating the obvious...
No, no, Albacore - I would never do such a thing.

I remember a large visionary some years ago. He had some great ideas, how modern Software should be build. He said, that there could be an centralized and open canvas to draw or write on it, and there could be developers, which creates some small tools to work with the canvas. He thought about Software as a construction kit with Objects/Components from different Software companies/Developers. There would be companies, which develops small texteditor components and other companies, which would program some pixel graphic components or vector graphic components - up to 3D graphic components . Each component would draw on the centralized canvas. There would be centralized functions to save/print/export the content of the (multipaged) canvas.

He thought, there would be no more large software packages with tons of functions. Instead there would be some small pieces of software from different vendors with access to the centralized canvas and the customers would be able to buy their components from different specialists:
  • Some texteditor components from Microsoft (MS Word), Adobe (InDesign) or Quark (QuarkXPress)...
  • Some bitmap manipulating components from Adobe (Photoshop) or Corel (Paintshop Pro) or an Open Source project (GIMP)...
  • Some vector graphics editor components from Xara (Xara Xtreme) or Corel (Corel Draw) or Adobe (Adobe Illustrator)...
  • Some 3D graphics editor/render components from Autodesk (3ds Max/Maya), Maxon, DAZ (Hexagon), McNeel (Rhinoceros) or an Open Source Project (POV-Ray or Blender)...


He had developed a great concept. And he was a personality with the necessary money to realize this concept.

But in reality it seems a little bit to complicated to develop such a software solution - even for Bill Gates, the visionary behind this thoughts.

Regards,
Remi

see also: Wikipedia article about Software componentry