Exactly. As I have heard it, they originally tried to sell their big developers (e.g. Adobe) on total rewrites for Rhapsody/NS/Cocoa and were more or less laugh

Exactly. As I have heard it, they originally tried to sell their big developers (e.g. Adobe) on total rewrites for Rhapsody/NS/Cocoa and were more or less laughed out of the room. Carbon was a compromise. I don't think the evolution of C vs ObjC APIs was a good proxy for the future viability of Carbon vs. Cocoa. If an API was intended for Carbon apps, it had to be C. If it was exposing core OS services already implemented in C, it was more likely to be C. Even fairly new APIs like Grand Central Dispatch have both C- and ObjC-intefaced components, based on the level of abstraction.