Well it depends on the level of abstraction you use. You could think of the operating system as the platform, and each piece of software as a plugin. That can

Well it depends on the level of abstraction you use. You could think of the operating system as the platform, and each piece of software as a plugin. That can work well enough. I can save a PNG in photoshop, and then open it in other programs and it just works. But the file paradigm has lost popularity and there are probably some good reasons for that.