Bill Gates dreamed up creating a single program that would allow you to create content regardless of whether you wanted a document a presentation or a spreadsheet. The office app was to be merged into a single unified app from which all kinds of content could be created and mixed/matched in a single file. A pretty useless idea if you ask me but Microsoft somehow believed it would be revolutionary.
My source for this is a book on OLE that I read in the early nineties so I can't provide the exact quotes as I no longer even remember its title.
When that did not work (technically as well as commercially) and the internet was threatening to relegate Microsoft and its software to irrelevance they rebranded OLE as ActiveX and attempted a frontal assault on the opennes of the Web through the Internet Explorer browser and the proprietary ActiveX controls. Luckily for us the thing was full of security holes and more or less blew up in Microsoft's face as a bit of a PR disaster. And that's kids how the web was saved from the first corporitization attempt.
I was told at the time (but I have no clue if it's true or not; it sounded plausible), that the dream was that companies/users could just roll their own applications from OLE components. So if your company workflow for some of the staff would require Word + Excel + Photoshop working in some way together, you would add these 3 to an empty application, hook them up with VBA (which was already included with the empty application) and then write it to an installer. The file format out/in would indeed combine these 3. It still sounds plausible when I write it. And not a bad idea (besides maybe the fileformat, unless you can easily untangle maybe).
The file format exists, its Compound Document Files which are effectively just a little FAT filesystem in a file from memory. both Microsoft and 3rd parties (...Autodesk maybe?) use them.
My favourite example of seeing them is VBA macro projects in office documents. The macros used to be stored in CDFs equivalent of a subfolder within a wider Word CDF document. When Office 2007 migrated from .doc to .docx, they just made the VBA project folder its own CDF file and stuck it in the new zip archive format
> that the dream was that companies/users could just roll their own applications from OLE components
Since at least the 70s there has been a dream of the software industry that it could be more like the electronics industry: you purchase a set of components and assemble them into something that does what you want. This has never quite worked out like that. It always develops its own unique pathologies, like npm's sprawling software BOMs of hundreds of thousands of libraries.
This idea was ubiquitous in the 90s, only comparable to the AI hype today. All software was going to be written as components which could be combined and embedded into applications. It wasn't just Microsoft with OLE, the other behemoth was CORBA driven by IBM.
Eventually the web browser absorbed and leapfrogged the whole idea (despite, as you mention, the best attempts of the 'establishment' to kill the web).
My source for this is a book on OLE that I read in the early nineties so I can't provide the exact quotes as I no longer even remember its title.
When that did not work (technically as well as commercially) and the internet was threatening to relegate Microsoft and its software to irrelevance they rebranded OLE as ActiveX and attempted a frontal assault on the opennes of the Web through the Internet Explorer browser and the proprietary ActiveX controls. Luckily for us the thing was full of security holes and more or less blew up in Microsoft's face as a bit of a PR disaster. And that's kids how the web was saved from the first corporitization attempt.