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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.
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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.
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!"
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.
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.