It requires zero malice and zero plans to dominate the market to add ActiveX to IE. I have 1000s of plugins (which MS and partners did via OLE/COM etc...) and a

It requires zero malice and zero plans to dominate the market to add ActiveX to IE. I have 1000s of plugins (which MS and partners did via OLE/COM etc...) and a new tech becomes popular (browsers) then it would be obvious to pretty much any engineer that I'd want to find a way make it possible to use those plugins in a browser. There's no need to make up some story about them doing it to force people to be Windows only. The same stuff applies all over. Why did Apple use Objective C as the core way to interact with MacOS X? To the person that distrusts Apple they'll claim it is solely to lock in developers. Some developer makes an app in Objective C, it's too much work to port. I'm pretty sure though the charitable view is it was inherited from NextStep. The person that distrusts Apple will still claim it was a choice that Apple could have chose something more compatible but stuck with it because it had lock-in benefits.