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:Flattery and Imitation

[drinkypoo]

The Win95 shell imitates NeXTStep in its appearance far more than it does MacOS, and its behavior is Motif-like. (Or vice-versa depending on who you ask.)

MS did this with Apple before

[marian]

Am I the only one who remembers the "Look and Feel" lawsuit Apple lost after MS first released Windows? MS already knows they can steal anything they like without any significant retribution from either the government or other corporations, which is exactly what they do. The only real innovation coming from Redmond is new and better ways to take other people's technology, add it to their own, then put the original creators out of business.

Re:Apple leadership?

[melatonin]

The same company that didn't offer a preemptive, protected multitasking OS until OS X

Wrong. The Apple Lisa had a pre-emptive multi-tasking OS with protected memory, but the hardware cost too much (the Motorola 68k in particular had a paging bug at the time that required them to use their own MMU). The Lisa was $10K in 1983. The Mac didn't have those features (and a lot more), and was $3K in 1984. The Mac won in the marketplace over the Lisa, therefore it can be argued that co-operative multi-tasking and a simple memory model are better.

After all, if pre-emptive multi-tasking and protected memory are so important, everyone would have used OS/2 instead of Windows 3.1.

dork.

Re:The both copy each other...

[raju1kabir]

Music from the Apple Music store can only be played on Apple computers, on Apple's MP3 software and on Apple's handheld device. The files have your name embedded in them and won't play if you want to let a friend listen to a copy. If your hard drive dies, you can't re-download it. How much more DRM-friendly can you get?

You conveniently left out the most important part:

You can freely burn the songs onto a standard CD and then listen to them anywhere and in any manner you choose.

THAT's the different between Apple DRM and MS DRM. Apple did what they had to in order to make the deal with the record companies: put some barriers in the way of egregious out-and-out mass piracy. Microsoft, on the other hand, is going above and beyond the call of duty: They're workng overtime with hardware vendors to ensure that in the future nobody, including independent content creators themselves, will be able to generate, distribute, or play any media without express permission from the distribution cartels.

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

[aussersterne]

The Linux community is throwing innovation away. There are things about X that drew me from PC/Mac to Unix/X then Linux back in the early '90s:

• Total configurability... you can choose anything from wm2 to KDE to act as your environment and at least once, you could make your environment behave in almost any way you wanted (remember dotfiles?)
  
• Nice UI features like focus-follows-mouse, horizontal/vertical maximize, "user placement" of applications (used to always use this in TWM, FVWM, etc.) and so on.
  
• Total network transparency.
  
• Multi-display, Xinerama, multiple-input, etc. etc. etc.
  
• Multiplatform application support (using Basilisk and Crossover, I have Windows applications, Mac OS applications and Linux/Unix applications all on the same desktop).
  

The Linux community has recently been rabid in its desire to get rid of such things. The "choose your environemnt" philosophy has been sacrificed in favor of the KDE/GNOME wars, and /. posters regularly bemoan the fact that even TWO choices are available. GNOME and recent distros have done away with focus-follows-mouse, user placement, and similar features totally; you can't even choose them as options in the default installs. Every X story on /. is met with a flood of "WE HATE NETWORK TRANSPARENCY" posts about the X11 protocol. People are more and more pushing for framebuffer+toolkit options that will make the more flexible output/input options unfeasible or at least less abstractable.

The current Linux community hates innovation. They wouldn't know innovation if it rose up and bit them in the ass. Anything new and different is seen as a kind of dangerous superceding of Windows, which is apparently what users REALLY WANT and Linux is talked about as being WAAAAAAY "behind" (aside from X-hating, KDE/GNOME-hating posts, witness the diatribes the other day against Unix in general in the Gobo story).

Linux began as almost pure innovation, an OS written from the ground up by GNU and Linus Torvalds. It is network-centric, runs on devices ranging from tiny to supercomputer, supported SMP, software RAID, IPV6, and a million other features before any of the other consumer operating systems. It's still one of the only free pieces of "major" software in the world. The marriage of Unix, new ideas, new technologies and new languages in Linux has created probably the single most productive large-scale computing environment in history, and at one of the lowest price points, too.

And yet Linux users (especially the converts over the last 3-5 years) can't stop moaning about how Linux will never be successful until it apes Windows and MacOS. And then they complain about a lack of innovation...

Methinks Linux users are confused. Or maybe they can't see the forest for the trees. Or something.