Through most of that article I was thinking "Yep, that's the kind of train-wreck you get when you design by committee, or worse by political need".
But toward the end, he says that the particular kind of technical train-wreck that they got was similar to the Mac API (presumably the this means the pre-OS X OS). "[As a resulting of accidentally being lots of databases] the X API is wide and shallow like the Mac, and full of interesting race conditions to boot."
Anyway, I didn't think that design by committee was one of Apples weaknesses.