Kaleida Labs

» see kaleida.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

kaleida sat inside the pre-web multimedia moment i was too young and too far away to see. in 1994 i was 10 in ankara and dial-up was still four years away for me. the debate over whether cd-rom or the network would win as the multimedia platform was happening in mountain view boardrooms i knew nothing about. by the time i learned the word scriptx, it was already dead vocabulary.

kaleida was announced in 1991 as a joint venture between apple and ibm, part of the same aim alliance push that also produced taligent and the powerpc. the plan was ambitious: scriptx would be a cross-platform runtime for interactive multimedia titles running on desktops and set-top boxes. the two parents put roughly forty million dollars into it before shipping anything.

scriptx 1.0 finally shipped in december 1994, three years after founding. within months the market it targeted had shifted. netscape 1.0 was out and java was being demoed at sun. the world was building for the browser, not the boxed cd-rom. kaleida spent 1995 trying to reposition and could not. apple and ibm announced the shutdown on 17 november 1995 and the entity ceased operations by mid january 1996.

~ the dossier ~

~ what scriptx was ~

scriptx was an object-oriented language and runtime built for interactive multimedia authoring. think a cousin of what quicktime interactive would later try, or what macromedia director already did, but aimed higher and more platform-agnostic. it was clean engineering by most accounts. it just was not what the market needed by the time it was ready.

~ what came after ~

kaleida was the second of the three doomed apple-ibm ventures from the aim alliance. opendoc kept going a bit longer and died in 1997. taligent had been quietly reduced to an ibm subsidiary by mid 1995. the whole 1991-1995 push to build a post-microsoft software stack via joint ventures ended up producing very little that shipped and even less that anyone used. apple's actual escape from the crisis came a year later when it bought next.

~ what got buried with it ~

the specific technical bet kaleida made, that interactive multimedia would centralize on a single cross-platform authoring runtime, did eventually come true. it was just called flash, then html5. the money and the years did not flow into either of those follow-on winners. kaleida was a five-year cul-de-sac that mostly proved that two large rival companies could not run a lab together.

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