For someone who doesn't want to get into "Apple Good. Microsoft Bad." level of rethoric you seem to have a lot of grudge against Apple. To answer your points, t

For someone who doesn't want to get into "Apple Good. Microsoft Bad." level of rethoric you seem to have a lot of grudge against Apple. To answer your points, they built their own OS and they had their own Office suite. They threw lots of stuff away afterwards, but from my point of view that's the very reason why I use an Apple laptop right now. Had they stick with the OS9 base, I'd never buy their products, the same way I don't consider buying a windows machine. For your point 2) do you really need a citation about Office versions backward non compatibility? I wouldn't care to qualify if those were done on purpose or not, fact is there's still product managers that green lit the release of products that would break silently compatibility with older versions in small but critically annoying ways (screwing the layout in a word doc is the last step before plain data loss) Point 4) about incentives, I always wonder why we ended up with Office version installing libraries that would affect the behavior of internet explorer. For instance as an intern I built a dynamic form for an intranet dedicated to IE (6 I think?), but it wouldn't properly work if a recent version of Office was not installed on the system. Of course I was writing shitty code, but yet it boggles my mind that Office would install system wide libraries affecting the behavior of so many applications. There was no incentive to prevent this kind of problems, or they were just really bad designers, pick your option.