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Jobs Claims Microsoft Is Shamelessly Copying
Nicholas Roussos writes "Steve Jobs was outspoken at a recent annual shareholder meeting. He claimed 'They are shamelessly copying us', referring to Microsoft. Of course, Microsoft has done its share of pointing fingers as well." From the article: "Most telling, Jobs said is that Tiger, the next version of Mac OS X, will go on sale later this month, while Longhorn is still more than a year away."
"More shameless... ...pointing fingers..."
I think that this is a lot of hot air. Apple is so far ahead of anything anyone else in the techn sector that someone copying them is only natural.
Even with the amount of development power available to Microsoft, they have never been able to catch up to Apple, the industry leader. This is not to say that Microsoft is somehow bound by their develpment skill, but rather their creativity.
Apple, in contrast to Microsoft, has taken the bold step of basing their operating system on Unix, which allows them to tap into the vast stores of development resources latent in the IBM/Solaris camps. Microsoft, unyielding, relies on their own developers who are slowly (but rapidly gaining speed) migrating to the more stable Unix-based systems.
I love Steve Jobs, but I think he's a little paranoid here. Losers always copy the winners. It'd be better to take comfort in the comfortable lead that Apple's got, rather than complain about parrots.
I believe it was Voltaire who said that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery.
By that logic, the more users there are of a product, the better designed and more reliable it should be, due to the greater meantime between releases. I guess that makes a lot of sense, what with how much more reliable Windows is than OSX and how much better polished and usable it is. *cough*
That's how the flowdown goes. Let's not throw stones in glass houses here, folks.
Linux and most OSS software is not exactly an innovator in any sense, it's mostly just a reimplementation of proprietary software already in existence.
But anyways, isn't all progress built on the success of others? Why should we deride Microsoft for implementing things that are good?
My god. If that's what they are quibbling over as being new innovations, then this industry is pretty well hooped. I see pretty much everything on that list as being evolutionary or been done for quite some time.
Search: Maybe I'm missing something, but name one somewhat modern OS without a built in search function.
Scripting: Again, maybe I'm missing something, but WTF!
RSS: This (again) has been done in Opera and Mozilla for quite a while.
Info Display Panel: No idea what this is. But it sounds like a web browser to me. It could be the single thing in this list worth fighting about though.
Instant Messaging: Who on earth wrote this list?
64-Bit Support: If I wrote this list, I would be inclined to just shoot myself in the head, and do the world a favour.
He claimed 'They are shamelessly copying us',
And killing you in the market. Still. More focus on winning on less on being beaten please.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Exactly. The big guys always have to take cues from the smaller ones because they simply can't afford to do anything that might be risky.
Political parties do the same thing.
Direct away from face when opening.
Yes. Because steal is definitely the same as license and pay for, and in 2005, everything is exactly the same as it was in 1982.
Oh wait. It isn't? It's not? Well then I guess it's not hypocritical.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
Longhorn does copy some features of Tiger. Even their "It Just Works" mantra is ripped from OS X Switch campaign that Apple launched years ago. One of the main criticisms I had with Gates and Co is that for years they tout all these "innovations" that Windows brings but in reality many of the innovations were either copied or bought from others.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
If by steal you mean legally came to an agreement with xerox. Then yes.
All progress is made from bits and pieces of previous experience which lead up to current progress. That's why there's never any giant leaps, that's why we didn't have some guy 10 years ago miraculously come up with a 3ghz processor. It's why we didn't have rock and roll in the 1600s. All past innovation leads up to current achievements.
Pointing fingers and complaining about who's copying who is not only non-productive but it is the same mindset which leads to all this IP mess that we're currently in.
So to you Mr.Jobs, get off your high horse. They didn't copy the wheel just because your latest car has one. It took that wheel to get you there, do not disrespect that wheel.
I'm not trying to defend microsoft or apple. I hate everything equally.
If you don't want someone to copy something, don't give it to anyone.
Ah, c'mon. And the Wright brothers stole the idea of wings from nature, and Edison stole the idea of light from generations of candlemakers, and Ford stole the idea of the assembly line from packinghouses in Chicago...
In almost all innovation, the genius isn't in the product or process itself. It's in the application of innovation to do things right. And it's on this count, the most important in my opinion, that the Wright brothers, Edison, Ford--and, yes, Apple--are genuinely innovative.
The "Info Display Panel" was done with Konfabulator (or whatever it's Linux counterpart is -- SuperKarumba, or something like that).
Nothing I've seen on this list is new. I've seen all of it in Linux, some of it before Windows/OSX, some of it after.
I think the companies ought to shut the hell up and make software (and hardware, in Apple's case -- I still believe that MS just gives out hardware designs and has a third party make it for them..)
bork bork bork!
the magic word here is System wide System wide search through all your data - seach string in all txt/word/PDF documents, in your mail, in your adress book. The same with scripting, the system needs internal support to use system fucntions in scripting.
Incidentally though, the list of "technologies" Microsoft is supposedly copying from Apple is remarkable for its lack of anything Apple did.
The Search features are something Microsoft has been touting for a long time, and in any case, Google got there first. Microsoft would almost certainly have implemented it regardless of what Apple did.
Easy (ie GUI based) Scripting is something Microsoft and Apple and others have been working on for decades. Hell, I remember one such tool being put on an Amiga magazine coverdisk. Unless Microsoft's solution is practically identical to Apples, which I doubt, it's a little unfair for anyone to accuse Microsoft of "copying" such a vague concept. Let's see what they've come up with.
RSS support in web browsers have been obvious since RSS was invented. What's surprising is that it hasn't been done yet by Apple or Microsoft. The credit for RSS support should go to RSS's inventors. Apple and Microsoft deserve criticism for waiting this long.
Dashboard is a widget, not information-display, tool as you point out. Sideshow is likely to be Microsoft's latest attempt at creating a usable "Active Desktop", first released in the mid-nineties. The two are not similar technologies and Microsoft isn't likely to have released their's in response to Apple.
Apple was not first with integrated IM/video. I used Yahoo! Messenger to do the same a while back. In any case, it's another "obvious enhancement", like RSS support. Microsoft likely would have implemented it anyway.
Putting 64 bit support in a category of things copied is as dumb as putting the support of more than 16Mb of RAM or SATA disks, and it's been done a zillion times before.
Jobs needs a kick in the nuts if he's complaining Microsoft is copying Apple when it comes to any of these technologies.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I wouldn't say that was the real problem. Microsoft's real problem is that they are making a major architectural change to the OS in the midst of changing requirements. Since Longhorn was first started, MS has had to revise it significantly to be more secure as spyware and viruses have become huge problems for their customers. Also Linux and OS X have been taking away their customers citing both security and other features as reasons. So MS has had to add more features to compete with them. Any time you are developing new software, scope creep can kill or significantly delay release.
Apple has had a different strategy that has worked for them. They made a fundamental architectural change when they launched OS X. They add significant new features with every release but the architecture is still the same.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I'm not an Mac owner, but Tiger's search doesn't sound anything like locate. Locate has no knowledge of file type, file contents or metadata. It couldn't show you "all Openoffice files written by John Smith last tuesday", for example. It wouldn't index you emails etc.
It also requires a complete database scan to update AFAIK, whereas spotlight updates its database in the background as it is integrated into the OS, so Spotlight will generally be up to date.
Free software that will be quite similar to Spotlight is Beagle, which looks pretty impressive.
You are missing something. The parent poster isn't claiming Apple invented scripting languages, or local search or RSS. Nope. What he is saying is that Tiger includes improvements to search (it is system wide, content wide search which makes use of all the metadata it can find), instant messaging, etc and Longhorn happens to include very similar improvements. There could be any number of reasons, really. Parallel evolution or drawing from the same outside inspiration are possibilities as well.
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Crudely Drawn Games
The ones referred to as pizza boxes were the LC and its descendants, the one he used is about twice as large.
When I saw that link, I figured he'd removed the center front panel and basically created a port replicator in the 610/660, so that one could slide an unmodified Mini into it kinda like the Duo. Now *that* would be cool.
And after reading that, I couldn't help but wonder why you wouldn't just cut a single hole in the back of the Mini (yeah, blasphemer, whatever) and hang a rounded IDE cable out of it encased in white acrylic, sort of like a ponytail. Then you put a nice, fast hard drive and optical drive into an external case and sit the Mini on top of that.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Search: Google's desktop search (not to mention the millions of others) is already available beating both MS and Apple to the post.
Scripting: Linux?
Built-in RSS support: Mozilla Thunderbird, Firefox, etc.
Info-Display Panel: Still not entirely seeing the point of this one it sounds like a souped up version of the old Windows Active Desktop to me!
Integrated Instant Messaging/Video Chat: Both Windows XP and OS X currently include a messenger anyway so is this even worth mentioning?!
64-Bit Support: Its about time! But Windows XP 64 Bit edition is about to launch and OS X Panther already includes some 64bit extensions...
I also get the impression they are integrating a lot of apps into both OS's, correct me if i'm wrong but hasnt MS only just had to remove Media Player from windows?? What makes OS X safe with Quicktime? Both companies seem to be repeating MS's anticompetition "mistakes".
When will we see OS X Reduced Media Edition and Windows Longhorn Reduced RSS/Messenger/Search edition?
Which is why the apple market has very little to do with the Windows market. You can't run Windows on the apple hardware (in general) and you can't run OSX on generic PC hardware. So the operating systems have eerilly similar features. Microsoft isn't threatening Apple's marketshare. If you've got apple, you know if you like it, and chances are slim you'll switch back based soley on the reason Microsoft comes out with new features. And vice vera. I know I won't switch to Apple just because their instant messanging software is new and improved. Completely different markets. Its almost the difference between Nissan the Carmaker and Nissan.com
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Yes, you're missing some things.
re: Search --> We're not talking about searching for file names with some matching string, or partially matching string. This is metadata search, AND filename search. I'm probably missing something here, but there's a particular /. user getting a lot of press lately whose comments you might want to read.
re: Scripting --> It's not that the OS will have scripting, it's that there'll be a user interface to make it easy for the masses.
Some of the things you do have a point about, but you need to consider that a lot of these features are being touted as they're either just being brought to the masses, or being brought in an easier to use way.
Agreed. It apparently okay to copy if you are going to release the product for free.
It's like saying it is okay to cheat as long as you also share your answers with everyone else.
The search they are talking about will be able to find content as well as titles of files -- so consider it more like a recursive grep on the system...
As for scripting -- Applescript has been around a very long time, and will still be there. Essentially what I believe they have done is to create a front-end gui for scripting the system -- Apple Events & Applescript with a UI that my mother probably can use. That is the essence of Apple's latest software development -- create something easy and quick to learn, computer-savvy independent, intuitive. That is their streak of late, to make the complex more accessible and user-friendly.
iPhoto does not beat Photoshop, but my mom can use iPhoto to rotate pictures, sharpen them, remove red-eye, and not even have to figure out where the photo is on the hard-drive.
That concept --the one where the user does not have to be a geek at all to accomplish a task that would normally be tedious and complicated otherwise-- is purely Macintosh.
I don't see my mother learning bash perl or python anytime soon. But I bet she would be able to create something useful with the Automator, within a half hour of toying with it.
Garageband is another excellent example of making something relatively complex -- digitized music -- so simple it is almost unethical. Walk in to the nearest Apple Store, put on the headphones, play with Garageband loops and before your feet hurt from standing there you will have music you can use as the backdrop for a talk show, a video, driving your car around town, a meditation tape, etc. Just a little more work and the ability to hold key and you can have a song.
Utter simplicity, and accessibility -- with hardware that does not challenge your aesthetic sensibilities...
Yeah -- and it comes with a price tag. Someone has to pay for the medical benefits of the people who obviously slaved away to produce such a polished piece of software. I work for myself and have no medical benefits, but gladly pay Apple the premium to take care of their own.
---- I'm out of your mind!
Apple is #1 in the HD-based mp3 player market and fast becoming #1 in the flash-based mp3 player market in the US. (They're #1 in Japan and I suspect many other countries too.) They are also #1 in the online mp3 sales market worldwide.
So . . . would you care to rephrase that, laddie?
Using your reasoning, BMW hasn't "won" (ever!) either. They're quite happy to let others sell cheap, commodity cars.
Apple doesn't have to dominate the desktop market. Aside from the fact that they've been going out of business for 30 years, they're doing very well financially lately. (Oh, if I only bought Apple stock 5 years ago.)
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Licensing is irrelevant, Apple didn't come up with the idea, which is the the essence of what Steve is arguing; that Apple creates and Microsoft copies. Uh-uh, Xerox created, Apple & Microsoft copied.
Apple didn't come up with the idea, which is the spirit of what Steve is arguing; that Apple creates and Microsoft just copies. Xerox did the creating. I'm sure that pisses off you apple zealots to no end but tough noodles:)
I'm not sure why Apple often gets the wrath on SlashDot from the Linux community. My only explanation is that Linux users are more often than not also Windows users. They dual boot. They have other PCs laying around running Windows. Why not use MacOS X and be able to run mainstream apps and have a unix core without dual booting? Why not run Yellow Dog Linux and truly thumb your nose at the MS/Intel duopoly? Apple is is the same boat as Linux. Trying to tell the world that they have a viable OS platform other than Windows. Apple is succeeding and putting a unix machine on millions of desktops. Be Happy!
yeah you're right, apart from the real-time and instantaneous results and sorting by file type and not having to type anything but your search and support for all file types... that's just as good *rolleyes*
bah, luddites.
In short, this list isnt so bad but back to the topic at hand, who is copying who - its perfectly plausible to say that neither party is copying each other; the changes are natural progressions in technology for the desktop and if anyone is being copied its the open source desktop community.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
Search: Maybe I'm missing something, but name one somewhat modern OS without a built in search function.
Name one modern OS with a search function that doesn't suck.
Agreed. It apparently okay to copy if you are going to release the product for free.
It's like saying it is okay to cheat as long as you also share your answers with everyone else.
No, I think a better analogy would be that it's okay to cheat as long as the test isn't for credit. In this case "credit" would represent "money."
- Search - Backing a search up with a database is hardly what I would call revolutionary. Searches aren't new, and neither is backing them up with a database. It was really just a matter of time until someone extended them on the desktop
- Scripting - Indeed. Key word is improvement, once more
- IM - I'm just completely shocked that they would even think that adding features to IM clients is revolutionary. Apple will no doubt include a feature to change your desktop theme to the style of the person you are talking to, and Microsoft will no doubt expand on their ability to let the person you are talking to control your computer.
- 64 bit support - Yeah, this is just retarded. No getting around that. Apple will be annoyed that Microsoft is supporting monitors next.
In short, this list isnt so bad but back to the topic at hand, who is copying who - its perfectly plausible to say that neither party is copying each other; the changes are natural progressions in technology for the desktop and if anyone is being copied its the open source desktop community.Exactly the point I was making in my original post. Except that I still think the list is one of the stupidest things I've seen in recent history. I personally think it's just a marketting ploy by Apple. They know that most people know that Microsoft has ripped them off in the past, and they know that they have a very loyal fanbase, so they just throw some dirt in Microsoft's general direction and hope it sticks. Myself, I am not a fan of either company, so I just think it's plain retarded.
But there's still a difference between lightning-fast search and incremental update, which is the same difference between a batch process and a command line or between a compiler and an interpreter. It's the feedback loop, man.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Maybe I'm missing something but Windows 95/98/ME/2K all have search. XP's version sucks bigtime and I don't know why they broke it and bloated the interface by forcing a wizard every single time you want to search for a file or text within a file.
I did a simple search for text within a file for "?PHP" and XP is the only OS that doesn't give me a result.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
This is as simple a search as it gets since all OS's already have filename "metadata". And it's SLOW. With Spotlight, you see results as quickly as you can type the letters. And it also works for file content, etc. Try that with a UNIX/Mac/Windows find.
Have you even looked at any pictures? This is: a) integrated into the OS and all programs via Applescript, and b) elegantly graphical. A UNIX shell script is NOT even comparable in either category: it has no hooks into other programs or the OS, and it's certainly not visual (much less elegantly so). Not sure what is meant here. Perhaps this means Dashboard, which is a very elegant, extensible widget mechanism. Yes, Konfabulator existed first, and it does use Javascript as well, but it uses it's own custom XML for layout instead of building (as Apple does) on existing solutions (HTML, CSS). I believe the difference is the level of aggregation of Safari's new RSS and Mozilla's bookmarks, including the ability to do searches on RSS feeds. Not sure how capable Mozilla is in this realm, though. You only have to think for a moment to realize that it's not the inclusion of Instant Messaging, which has existed for quite some time. (Even looking only at Apple's software, iChat has been around for years now, much less the Big World.) The difference is in the features of iChat, which now includes 4-way videoconferencing and 10-way audio conferencing. Not revolutionary, but one of the slickest packages out there and it's about to become the lowest-common-denominator for every Mac.Being able to copy from other people should also considered an art.
You could create something innovative or improve upon the existing technology by copying from others' work
buffering...
Thanks for making my prediction come true.
The word I should have used is "pervasive". It's a common syntax across the system and applications.
I admire the Open Source movement, but a holistic design is not something that can be accomplished by 1000's of separate hackers (heck, look at the *wide* acceptance of LSB). You kinda cheated and used KDE apps, commandline, and OpenOffice as exeamples; which require 4 different scripting languages. Apple has the money and the drive to make the scripting language uniform and ubiquitous.
Which unless you have written for it, you won't get its power.
I was recently helping a friend of mine shop for a new system. He had been using PCs with Windows for the longest time, and I never heard the end of the complaints about how Windows screwed this up and how Windows screwed that up. So finally, after trying to convince him for years, I helped him buy a new Mac. He had some money to spend (he's rollin' in dough) so he bought a Mac Mini with the faster processor and all the options, and got the wireless Apple keyboard. He already had a really nice Samsung display and a Logitech wireless trackball, along with a Firewire/USB hub with plenty of ports.
When he realized that he could plug in his digital camera and his digital video camera, the hard disk almost instantly filled up with stuff. So the next day, we went back to the store and picked up a Maxtor Firewire hard drive with a 250 gig capacity. He copied tons of digital photos and videos from his other computers. I introduced him to iTunes, so he just had to import all of his MP3s from two PCs, which were bursting at the seams with MP3s. The 250 gig drive filled up quite fast, so the day after that, he bought a second one; luckily there is an "available" firewire port on the Maxtor drive, so you can "daisy chain" them.
But that's not all! With the Mac Mini, the two external drives, the USB/Firewire hub, the display, keyboard, and mouse, his desk actually looked quite clean. (He's good at organizing cables.) It's amazing how much stuff fits into small boxes nowadays. So he had to go "shopping"... Picked up a new iPod, Final Cut Studio or whatever it's called, and Adobe Creative Suite for the Mac... I swear he dropped almost four grand on stuff for this Mac in a few days. This from a guy who thought Macs suck.
He was quite amazed when he found out that Final Cut is made by Apple. He knew it was a serious program, but he never thought about who made it. When I explained that Apple makes the computers, the operating system, and software that does just about every function you can dream of, he was amazed that one company can do all of these things, and do each one of them much better than any other company out there. Specifically, he was shocked and amazed that Microsoft, with thousands of times the resources that Apple has, can't even get their operating system working properly.
We came to the conclusion that the problem facing Microsoft and many other companies is simply that Microsoft is mediocre. It's an easy problem to fall into. Microsoft is simply mediocre because the quality of their work is not important to them. They are simply greedy for money. Now they'll tell you that they care, and they're working to fix the security flaws, etc., but only because they realized that those security flaws are impacting their bottom line. As long as those flaws did not affect Microsoft in any significant way, they would have continued to ignore them.
Personally, I believe that if security flaws did not impact the sales of Microsoft software at all, Microsoft would simply ignore them and not care that your data, your identity, your finances, etc., are at risk. Because they're mediocre.
Apple, on the other hand, is a first-class company. Say what you will about their stuff being more expensive, but believe me, you get what you pay for. Someone has to get paid for making true innovations. Even though some things in their OS existed in other OSes before them (Spotlight - Query in BeOS). I think they're constantly improving.
The whole who's copying who debate is silly. It doesn't really matter, and if competitors are incorporating the best ideas from the industry, we all win, regardless of platform. There is nothing worse than the "not invented here" syndrome. But there is something worth noting with Longhorn: there doesn't seem to be any fresh thinking. The fact that we are having this debate and not one person has defended Microsoft by pointing out a feature that is totally unique and ground breaking is telling. Very telling. Not one single feature that someone can point out as unique and innovative to Microsoft for others to copy. Not a single one. And that, I think is the problem with Microsoft and their role in the industry.
Microsoft announces, then develops.
Apple develops, then announces.
Just because Microsoft issues a press release or throws a press conference and says that the next version of Windows is going to have [feature], that doesn't mean that Apple hasn't already had [feature] under development/running in a lab somewhere for a year.
For example, the search capability in Tiger known as "Spotlight." Apple applied for a patent on the technology behind Spotlight (a patent that was granted in January of this year, BTW) when OS X 10.0* was still a year and two months away from public release. Which means they started working on it in 1999 if not sooner. Years before the name "Longhorn" was ever uttered by anyone at Microsoft.
~Philly
*OS X 10.0 release date: 3/24/2001
The NT security model itself is quite sophisticated, it derives directly from the old VMS model. Butler Lampson et.al., who designed it, are some of the computer security gurus.
The main problem with NT's security is not the model itself, it's the various ways how it gets circumvented to either have some nifty feature which looks nice at a demonstration without a real use (ActiveX) or because the ways how NT is used by application designers and users is contradictionary to the model. Applications that need administrator priviledges to run are inherently flawed. They are applications, something that is applied on top of the inner workings and shouldn't know about any priviledges necessary for system administration.
NT is a good example how OS design itself doesn't create computer security. It is the way how an OS is used, procedures, usage patterns, deployment, applications, which create an environment for computers which is more or less secure. OS security is a single aspect of overall computer security.
Your first example is not really a Linux/Unix vulnerability (in fact the vulnerability is the same on WinNT), it is an application vulnerability. If it propagates through to the operating system (as it does if the user has far reaching OS priviledges), then it may point out an OS problem. Under Unix/Linux it should normally not affect OS integrity.
The second is indeed an OS problem, because it is a driver problem, and most drivers need OS priviledges to run. It would be possible to have drivers run in a sandbox like environment with a protection layer against the kernel and other drivers which helps to keep driver vulnerabilities local to the driver and the hardware the driver is operating. Sadly neither the Linux kernel nor the WinNT kernel are well prepared for such security layers. There are experiments with minimalistic kernels (microkernels) which provide such layering, but they didn't have much impact into mainstream computing yet. You might be interested in the L3/L4 series which allow userland drivers.