Kaleida Labs - Closure

Closure

At the time of its formation, Kaleida’s ScriptX was envisioned as an authoring platform for CD-ROMs, and later for DVDs, which would hold much more information. The Kaleida Media Player was to be a runtime environment that would allow presentations, games, educational software, kiosks, and many other kinds of entertainment to run on multiple platforms. By fostering its development, Apple and IBM sought to maintain their own position in the software development arena at a time when Microsoft’s power was rising.

Kaleida Labs and its parent companies had always envisioned the Kaleida Media Player as a proprietary and closed-source operating system, one designed for a more limited market than Java. After Netscape's public offering early in 1995, many software developers recognized that the browser itself would pose a challenge to Windows, and that the browser would become a multimedia platform in its own right. By late 1995 it was clear that ScriptX had lost its momentum in the market, even though the company was on the verge of shipping ScriptX Version 1.5. In November 1995, Apple Computer and IBM announced the closure of Kaleida Labs, effective in January 1996. In effect, the Netscape browser had taken on the functions that were intended for the Kaleida Media Player, while Java was seen to have taken on the role that was intended for ScriptX (although JavaScript eventually succeeded where Java failed as a client side scripting language).

Kaleida had already shipped Version 1.0 of ScriptX early in 1995, and a few development efforts were underway. However, most potential developers had been taking a wait-and-watch approach to the Kaleida Media Player, waiting for Kaleida to solve performance problems and ship a more stable version of ScriptX. Closure of Kaleida Labs was scheduled for early 1996, but the parent companies announced that they would ship ScriptX 1.5 anyhow. Future development of ScriptX would move to a group inside Apple Computer, and Apple offered jobs to most members of the ScriptX engineering team.

ScriptX Version 1.5 shipped almost concurrently with the closure of Kaleida Labs. By shipping ScriptX, Apple and IBM met contractual commitments they had made to developers and avoided legal difficulties. Within a few months, development of ScriptX withered away inside Apple, and the remaining employees had either migrated to other jobs at Apple, or had left for other companies in the industry. Ultimately, only two multimedia content projects ever shipped using ScriptX 1.5. One was a CD-ROM version of the Swedish National Encyclopedia, Nationalencyklopedin, developed by Linné Data of Gothenburg, Sweden. The other was an interactive music title, Robert Winter's Crazy for Ragtime.