OLE offers the following benefits:
An application can specialize in performing one job very well. For example, a drawing application that implements OLE does not need any text-editing tools; a user could put text into the drawing and edit that text by using any text editor that supports OLE.
An application is automatically extensible for future data formats, because the content of an object does not matter to the containing document.
A user can concentrate on the task instead of on any software required to complete the task.
A file can be more compact, because linking to objects allows a file to use an object without having to store that object's data.
A document can be printed or transmitted without using the application that originally produced the document.
Linked objects in a file can be updated dynamically.
Future implementations of this protocol could take advantage of a wide variety of object types. For example, the user of a voice-recorder application could dictate a comment, package the comment as an object with a visual representation, and embed the graphic as an object in a text file. When a user double-clicked the graphic for this object (a pair of lips, perhaps), the voice-recorder application would play the recorded comment. Linked and embedded objects also lend themselves to implementations such as animated drawings, executable macro scripts, hypertext, and annotations.