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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.'"
Honestly, you'd think the Internet would have spread information to the four corners of the Earth, but all it does it perpetuate the myths.
--- Ban humanity.
That article was short and uninformative. The only "innovative" feature clearly alleged stolen is the particular aspect ratio of the screen, which 1) who cares and 2) isn't an "idea", just a design choice.
Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple in 1997. It was definitely not 25% of Apple shares and I don't think they even had enough to vote on anything.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Ok, this has to be THE worst interpretation of facts I have ever seen in my life. It is SO far from the truth it's not even funny.
August 6, 1997, Microsoft agreed to purchase $150 million in non-voting Apple preferred stock. This wasn't anywhere close to 25%. Note that it was NON-VOTING stock - so essentially it was just a goodwill investment in Apple. Microsoft was required to hold the stock for at least 3 years before selling. Another clause of this investment was that Microsoft was to continue to produce Macintosh products, including all new versions of the Microsoft Office product.
Microsoft has since sold all of this stock - at a nice profit, I might add. Additionally, the agreement that required Microsoft to continue to develop Macintosh products has since expired as well.
I could have just modded this down - but I thought that attempting to correct this ridiculous interpretation of events would be more beneficial.
Myth.
Or, at least heavily in need of editing.
What really happened is this:
Microsoft bought $150M in non-voting stock at a rather good price, and promised to continue Mac software development (in specific, the development of their Office suite and Internet Explorer WWW browser).
Apple, in turn, agreed to bundle IE as the default browser on all OS installation disks, license rights to several of its software products, and support Microsoft's forays into Java virtual machine development.
The agreement was to last five years, and has since expired. Microsoft made money off the deal, considering the value of Apple stock when it sold it off. Additionally, Apple didn't really need the $150M infusion, as it had billions in cash reserves. A additional reason that MS might have made this move, was that the DoJ investigation into anti-competitive practices might have been countered by actions like this -- Redmond was essentially supporting a competing OS.
So, no, Microsoft never "bought 25% of the shares of apple" [sic], nor does it/did it really have any say in Apple policy.
I think you'll find there's a lot of big ideas coming through, both in the back- and front-ends of GUI design.
Take KDE, for example, and its KIOSlave system, which is slowly moving KDE from being a collection of applications to a collection of pluggable components, with things like Konqueror becoming complicated wrappers for these components. The whole desktop is totally integrated - that's big, isn't it?
Or Enlightenment, whish is going even further to do away with the whole application concept altogether, or so I've heard (I don't use it).
And even little projects are doing interesting things, like Slicker, experimenting with how we manage our desktop space.
All these calls are ill-founded, and probaly stem from the fact that it is easy to keep up to date on Microsoft's and Apple's big moves, since you only get the occasional big article, whilst developments in the Free Software world come thick and fast.
Didn't Next have a compositing display engine way back in the 70's via its postscript based engine? And as memory serves served as inspiration for Aqua and it's PDF based display engine.
Music from the Apple Music store can only be played on Apple computers,
.0000 so far.
Wrong. iTunes will be out for Windows later this year.
won't play if you want to let a friend listen to a copy.
Wrong. You can have the file installed on up to three computers at the same time, and can freely move it from one to the other. This is only an issue if you want more than three "friends" to listen, in different locations, at the same time.
If your hard drive dies, you can't re-download it.
Wrong.
You're batting
I don't like DRM either, particularly, but how about some INFORMED criticism?
THAT's the different between Apple DRM and MS DRM.
Actually Microsoft's DRM does allow you to burn to CD. Or transfer to portable players. The difference is Microsoft provides content owners with the ability to toggle these features. Don't blame Microsoft if record labels won't turn the flag on. EMI's new service, for example, is supposed to allow CD burning.
Apple was playing catch up too. From what I hear, Amigas had an excellent GUI, and far superior hardware to what Apple ever could offer. Amiga had innovative features such as a Color Screen, Stereo Sound, and 3d Graphics Capabilities. While Macs still had tiny monochrome displays, and the Wild Eep.
BTW, I can read a Word'95 doc into Office 97, Office 2000, and Office XP. It's really a non-issue
Yes and no - MS has put in a lot of work (although in the grand scheme of things it may not mean all that much since they have so many resources to throw at any problem) in maintaining forward compatibility for apps etc. (e.g. when Win95 was first released I was reading about how they had specific code to modify behaviour (i.e. reimplement bugs
But let's not forget how when Word97 came out the
We may be facing this with the next "XML document format" MS Word on the way...
You really believe Microsoft invented graphical user interfacing? (aka 'Windows')
You should get out more.
Here's one of several short summaries available on the web covering the development and history of the GUI.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
That's what I thought. Yeah, you could kludge it, but until Airport, Macs didn't have 802.11 APs. MUWAHAHAHAHA. Among a LONG list of other things.
Yes. Apple gave Xerox quite a lot of stock options for what little they used from the Alto work. And they got permission from Xerox HQ to look at the inner works of Alto in the first place. Xerox PARC was more than hesitant, but HQ ordered them to cooperate.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Exacly what features of the Nextstep does win95 offer? "windowblinds"? Sure, if you download a serious modification. 95 shipped with the clumsy three button junk from win3.1 plus an extra button and a pannel. A root menue anywhere on the screen? Nope. The way it resizes windows? Nope. Menues that you can leave up on the screen? Nope. Can you name one feature that is not simply part of any GUI? I'm not going to go into the tremendous difference in the unerlying systems but just look at the apearances alone.
Nextstep was made from MacOS and was better. Windoze never did much more than follow along the GUI path, never evolving much from the first one they made. The evolution and lines of influence are clear when you look at screen shots from each.
For those of you not familiar with Next, check out this 1993 screen shot of the first web browser. The client was developed in 1990. There are many free implementations of the Nextstep such as Window Maker today. It still kicks any GUI Microsoft has ever made. After using a reasonable window manager on X, few people can go back to the M$ GUI confines.
For those of you fortunate enough to have missed Windoze 3.1, here is a little screen shot from 1993 or so when Netscape became one of the first available browsers for Windoze. 95 added the X button on the top right, so I suppose you could say it coppied Nextstep in one way. Here is a typical Win95/98 desktop. Windoze XP (screen shot to compare), is more of the same and annoying as all hell.
Please don't compare reasonable software, such as Nextstep or Sun's Common Desktop Environemnt, to junk from Microsoft. People might get the idea that one was better than it is or that the other sucks in ways it never did.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If WordPerfect could do it, why couldn't Microsoft? A WordPerfect document is nothing more than an SGML document. Create a document in WordPerfect 2002, save it, open it in WordPerfect 6, 7, 8, 2000, or 2002. You don't lose all that much formatting info, and you don't lose any of the content.
After using WordPerfect since version 7, I am appalled at the lack of consitency in Word. Why the hell can't they make a .doc format that is compatible across versions??
Afterall, XML is nothing more than a subset/extension of SGML ... why has it taken them so long to take advantage of it?? And why won't it work back to Word 95?? Somebody made a big mistake a long time ago, and they won't be fixing it anytime soon. Afterall, if they don't change the file format, what incentive is there to upgrade??
That's not Apple's default desktop picture, Apple's is very different than that. What is pictured is a wallpaper that ships with every copy of Windows XP. I believe it's called Crystal.
OS/2 had all the features of Windows 95 back in 1992, and those features were for the most part better implemented. Look where OS/2 is now...
There are a few reasons why OS/2 hasn't taken the lead in OSes. One reason is that OS/2 used a lot RAM that was very expensive that time. The people chose what was cheaper.
Oh and just FYI: OS/2 was a combined effort from IBM and Microsoft (up to OS/2 1.3 I believe).
You can also enable the debug menu from the Terminal by typing (with Safari not running): % defaults write com.apple.safari Includedebugmenu 1 then restarting Safari.
WordPerfect 8 supported somehow sgml, but it wasn't the default. It saved in it's own binary format.
Besides WP 8 crashed so many times, that I'd rather spent my time converting Word 97 to Word 95 documents (if ever needed).
(-% TwistedMind %-)
Ah, yes, I remember this well.
Xerox came out with the GUI. Apple and Microsoft both started working on a GUI. Apple asked Microsoft to support MacOS (by releasing apps such as Word and Microplan for the Mac). Microsoft agreed, but required Apple to sign an agreement that Apple not sue MS over Windows. Apple signed the agreement. Later, Apple sued MS over Windows.
In the suit, Apple claimed that Windows infringed on a nebulous concept called "look and feel". The judge threw out all "look and feel" claims, and would only consider specific claims. Then the judge went down the list, throwing out any claim that was covered by the agreement. About a dozen claims were left. Then the judge went down the list, and threw out any claim that Apple didn't own (common GUI things that anyone could do without Apple's permission). Exactly zero claims were now left, and the judge dismissed Apple's suit.
Short version: Apple agreed not to sue, sued anyway, and the judge ruled that the agreement was perfectly valid and threw out the suit. Seems fair to me.
And, by the way, we would not now have either GNOME or KDE had Apple won that suit. Apple winning that suit would mean Apple owns GUI desktops, and that would be Very Bad Indeed. Forget free desktops for Linux. Even forget non-free desktops for Linux; Apple would insist you buy an Apple computer running an Apple OS if you wanted a GUI desktop. (And any Apple fans who want to claim otherwise: how many licenses has Apple sold to the TrueType patents?)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
The point was that win95 was still dos underneath, and you still had 8.3 filenames in there, they just faked it to make it look like long filenames were supported. So the C:\ongrats.w95 very elegantly said "Ha, that's just a cheap hack on top of DOS, with all the same limitations", or something like that.
Liberty uber alles.
From an MS press release:
Apple demanded $1.2 billion from Microsoft for alleged patent infringements...
The negotiations that resulted led to a strategic agreement between the two companies in August 1997, one part of which called for Microsoft to invest $150 million in Apple and for Apple to install Microsoft's Internet Explorer as the default Web browser for its customers... As part of his videotaped deposition, however, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates testified repeatedly that his primary goal was to resolve the patent issues with Apple and obtain a patent cross license.