Damn cool! Has Richard Moss being around here and did he contact you via the forum, or other ways?
Well the article is quite nice, but there are two thoughts completely missing in my opinion.
1.) Mac OS 9 is not to compare with DOS, Amiga or similar Retro plattforms. It is at least at the level of Win2k and was extremely professional in 2000 to 2002! So it once was a mainstream plattform which was able to do everything. That means that the fact that it was abandoned man-made (and not becoming obsolete because of new inventions), is hightly important. Apple made a decision against its user base, for the shareholder value. So mixing it up with some Retro gear and OS is not correct as I think.
2.) And it leads us to the 2nd thought that I belive is really important: Apple got a lot of critics back than. They needed to put a lot of power into marketing and forcing people to use X. They needed to make X man-made incompatble to older hardware, as they needed to make newer hardware man-made incompatible to 9 as we know these days. So they really forced us at every possible way to use the "new" OS. They even intervened at other companies to stop supporting 9. I once read somethign from the Opera-Browswer chief, that Apple was really unhappy that they didn´t abandon the 9 browser immediatly and supported Mac OS 9 till Opera 6.03.
So all that developments generated a kind of resistence that could never be killed completely (just remember how long it took Qark to do a X-version of XPress). And on the other hand as the advantages of X were not real, there simply was no need to switch to a different OS.
The fact that we got a proprietary OS at proprietary hardware, and a "mother company" thaat is working agains us for 17 years, and that we are still around, should tell everything.
BTW, I am really stunned that I should be the only one reporting Cameron that Classilla is my only way to browse the web. I cannot imagine that concering that there have been more than 120.000 Classilla downloads yet.