In an open marketplace, "People associate X with Y" is very much the same as "Y is responsible for X." This explains a lot of the legacy code in pre-Windows Vista Windows; if new versions of the OS broke someone's favorite app, they blame Windows, even if the reason the app broke is it didn't adhere to (or even actively tried to circumvent) published API (Adobe was notorious for trying to squeeze a few extra cycles of performance out of Photoshop, for example, by hand-rolling their own C++ data structure instances by building a binary-compatible pattern in memory instead of calling the documented constructor in the WinAPI).
