Microsoft Bites Apple, Apple Bites Back

hype7 writes "The NYT (free reg reqd etc) is running an interesting article on where MS seems to be getting all the ideas for its next big OS release, Longhorn. It's only a quickie, but they look at MS's big news from WinHEC, and their possible sources for inspiration. They also pull out that fantastic Bill Gates quote: 'The one thing Apple's providing now is leadership in colors'; and that Apple execs are now having a laugh of their own over how Longhorn, 'Microsoft's 2005 version of its Windows operating system, apes features that have been in Apple's OS X operating system since 2001.'"

Comments

Re:Apple leadership?

[Cro Magnon]

Maybe. But Apple's consumer OS multitasked like Win 3.1! Win95 did better than the Mac!

Re:Why aren't we seeing UI innovation in Linux?

[Sanity]

Total configurability... you can choose anything from wm2 [all-day-breakfast.com] to KDE [kde.org] to act as your environment and at least once, you could make your environment behave in almost any way you wanted (remember dotfiles?)

Themability simply isn't a priority for the vast majority of users, and it often stands in the way of usability. I would prefer one UI that works well than have the choice of hundreds of inconsistent and incompatable UIs.

Linux began as almost pure innovation

Uh? Linux is a reimplementation of Unix - there is very little in Linux that wasn't originally in a commercial unix. Placing it under the GPL may have been innovative philosophically, but there has been very little innovation technically.

Re:Apple hardware is for real computer lovers.

[Lars T.]

So how many buttons does your mouse have? And do you still need to use keyboard-mouse combinations to do some things?