Announced in 1991, the company began operations in the summer of 1992 with Nat Goldhaber serving as its first CEO.[1] The company was staffed by hand picking members of Apple's QuickTime team, along with members from the big-iron content delivery side at IBM. Kaleida's corporate offices were located in Mountain View, California, at sites near the Shoreline Amphitheater on the east side of U.S. 101. Kaleida was one of the earliest companies to post a corporate website.
The early model for the system was the Kaleida Media Player, or KMP. This was essentially a cross-platform interactive version of the QuickTime Player that would run on the Apple Macintosh, IBM PC clones, as well as set-top boxes and other platforms. It was intended to be a single universal multimedia system. On top of this model was the ScriptX programming language and object library, which allowed developers to make the media files completely interactive.
According to statements made at the Digital World Conference, Goldhaber stated that ScriptX would allow developers to distribute their work on practically any device simply by “hitting a button on a screen and selecting ‘Save as ScriptX’."[2] Grandiose statements were typical, with Goldhaber later stating that "It actually does have some genuine social importance."[3]
Goldhaber's flamboyant style, expensive company payroll, and lack of obvious progress led to negative stories in the press. One executive who described that "the company has spent about $20 million in its one year of existence and that Apple and IBM are loath to continue spending money at that rate. He said Kaleida salaries are high and that the company has too many employees for its current stage of development".[4]
In early 1993, Goldhaber and the board started fighting over stock options and whether the company should go public. On July 18, 1993, the company announced that Goldhaber was being replaced as CEO by Mike Braun, formerly of IBM. The company stated that Goldhaber would remain on the board in efforts to build industry partnerships, but blamed a lack of progress on this front, and Goldhaber's "hands off" management, as the main reasons for the switch.[5] In parting, Goldhaber quipped that different cultures and political maneuverings at IBM and Apple doomed the company from the start.
Refocus and release
Following Goldhaber's ousting, the company's focus was narrowed. Plans to build a system for set-top boxes was officially abandoned in April 1994.[6] Kaleida's mission from then on was to complete and support the ScriptX language and multimedia object library, which by this point were very late. Kaleida sought to bundle the KMP as system software with new personal computers. At the same time, CD-ROM developers could ship the KMP with content to support existing Windows and Macintosh systems. As part of the new focus, the company was downsized, with layoffs representing about 20 to 25% of the workforce.[6][7]
In late 1993 and early 1994, the company's objective was for the Kaleida Media Player to run on a reference platform consisting of either a 25 MHz Motorola 68030 or a 25 MHz Intel 80486 processor running with 4 MB of random access memory. Such a system was typical of the installed base at that time, and most new computers were shipping with a read-only CD-ROM drive. Toshiba, which had supported Kaleida's set-top box effort, became a minority stakeholder. Throughout its brief history, Kaleida maintained cross-platform development efforts for Windows (both Windows 3.1 and Windows 95), the Macintosh (supporting both the 68000 and PowerPC platforms), and OS/2.
The ScriptX development kit and the 1.0 version of the Kaleida Media Player were finally released on December 19, 1994, now considerably late.
Changing market
Kaleida had been founded partly as an authoring environment for applications based on CD-ROMs. But the product life cycle of CD-ROMs, which had been heralded for years as a content delivery system, turned out to be surprisingly short. By 1995 it was becoming clear that the World Wide Web would be delivering many of the lightweight interactive systems that were previously delivered in CD-ROM, and while video and similar high-bandwidth systems were not yet suitable for the Web, they did not need the development environment or interactivity offered by something like Kaleida.
Kaleida had also been formed, to some degree, to offer an alternative to the Wintel platform for what at that point appeared to be an emerging market in the CD world. Goldhaber had mentioned this on many occasions, describing the upcoming "war" for multimedia.[2] 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. The standalone platform to attack Wintel now existed. Kaleida then started an effort to deliver objects over the Internet and deliver Web content.[10]
Most potential Kaleida developers had been taking a wait-and-watch approach to the system, waiting for Kaleida to solve performance problems and ship a more stable version of ScriptX. However, the company had not been able to demonstrate a system that ran acceptably in less than 16 MB of RAM, which was at that time the "high end" of the market. Macromedia
Closure
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.[11] 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, in January 1996.[12] By shipping ScriptX, Apple and IBM met contractual commitments they had made to developers and avoided legal difficulties. 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.
After Kaleida
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. The Director application remained a major force in the multimedia market for a time, but was supplanted and then replaced, by Flash. Early versions of Flash are in many ways a clone of ScriptX, using a small plug-in runtime with an event-driven language and similar resource requirements.
