I know there was more to it than that, but it seems to me that a better managed Apple in some alternate history might have just thrown all the extensions "suppo

I know there was more to it than that, but it seems to me that a better managed Apple in some alternate history might have just thrown all the extensions "support" out, shipped, and said there would a better documented API for that kind of crap in the future. Probably also not waste time on OpenDoc because there was no shot that was ever going anywhere if you considered it from Microsoft's, QuarkXpress's and Adobe's perspectives. Which is basically one of the reasons Mac OS X actually ended up shipping. You got a Classic VM in an OS that otherwise didn't care about making breaking changes, but you had a sliding scale from Classic to Carbon to Cocoa to fix your software eventually. Also OpenDoc got thrown out of consideration very early in the house cleaning process at Apple.