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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."
both OSX and Longhorn borrowed from operating systems like OS/2, AmigaOS, Linux (GNOME and KDE), as well as a lot of F/OSS projects out there that did basically the same things.
In fact, both Apple and Microsoft copied from Xerox's PARC to get the GUI in the first place. Before Apple or Microsoft saw the Xerox PARC demonstrations they were using text based menus, and the Macintosh project resembled more like the Cannon Cat with leap keys.
There are no innovations today in commercial software, the F/OSS projects led the way, but before they can patent something, a commercial company comes along and patents the same thing and claims it as their own. Without F/OSS projects there would be no OSX, and no Longhorn.
I just finished reading Revolution in the Valley. One of my favorite quotes from the book is when Jobs confronts Bill about copying the Mac, and Bill says, "No, Steve, I think its more like we both have a rich neighbor named Xerox, and you broke in to steal the TV set, and you found out I'd been there first, and you said. "Hey that's no fair! I wanted to steal the TV set!"
the cosmos in 20 words or less: thumbuki.com
Dashboard is a Konfabulator clone.
Click here to give me 1/250th of an Opera license!
Well OS X is definitely "polished," and you can add "brushed" to the description as well.
Usability is debatable though.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
This calls for a completely off topic but intelligent thread to be started. How about this one:
Casemodded mac mini doubles it's disk performance
This guy case modded his mac mini putting into an old centris pizza-box. The faster disks and CD boosted performance 20% to 70% on AV things like DVD-copy and CD-to-AIFF and file copying. Overall Xbench-disk gives the set up a 2x performance enhancement.
so the new Official discussion topics are:
1) wow cool retro case mod for $10
2) Did apple cripple the mini just to make it cool?
And is that bad really. After all it is quiet and welcome in the living room something many people would pay a LOT for. Performance is not all.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The built-in RSS support is nothing new and already is integrated in a lot of OSS now, this is something I wouldn't be proud of. As for the new Dashboard, it's a copy of Konfabulator which is itself a copy of "Apple's Desk Accessories."
Everyone is copying from everyone else and it's not a bad thing. All the good ideas from old systems are implemented now with new stuff. The difference is: Apple does it better, cleaner (more intuitive) and before Microsoft.
Agree.. but if you read the article, media bloated his comments more than what he implied.
If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today...The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.
While I understand Jobs' compliants and squabbling he has to keep on pushing. What he has been able to accomplish with Apple is remarkable. Steve Jobs has the foresight to move ahead and come out with new innovative products. In just about every market you're going to have somebody nipping at your heals to try to beat you to the punch. It just so happens the market leader is stealing from the secondary leader this time.
Microsoft has their own set of problems to worry about and I think both operating systems have their own segments in the world today. Really though as of lately I think a lot of people are switching to a Mac. I have friends who have been Windows fans who are fed up with the licensing, security etc etc and have decided to move to the MacOS.
Moreover, I see the problem being were each OS fits into the world. The MacOS always seems to stay with the education systems, graphic arts people, designers, editing and hardcore Mac addicts; while Windows hits up everybody else.
Apple needs to rev up it's marketing and start hitting other users. Eg. Corporate users
I say we just grow up, be adults and die.
We all know Apple invented the TabletPC, Media Center PC, PocketPC, XBox, ...
Okay, how about these? eMate (1997), MacTV (1993), Newton (1993), Pippin (1995)
Seriously, someone wrote "64 bit support"? Is that legit? So, innovation is supporting the new hardware? That's absurd. So, is Apple copying Dell by offering compatibility with the latest video card or whatever?
Stoooooopid.
Most of these other things are built into an average Linux distro. Additionally, if you buy a Dell, many of them are just as present, as OEM addons.
Look, I'm sure Microsoft *is* copying Apple where they can. They always have, for my entire life. But the list of crap they are moaning about is ridiculous.
Windows was announced in 1983, the Mac came out in 1984. How did that happen? Easy... Microsoft was already developing software for the Mac before it was released, and Bill knew Microsoft had to do at least as well if they were going to stay in business.
Present day: "We want better security in Windows! Why can't it have something like UNIX's security model?"
10 years later: "Those bastards! They copied/snarfed/stole the UNIX security model!"
This is probably what will happen too. People will scream for something to be added to/changed in windows, and then Microsoft will get bad mouthed for implementing it.
I have no sympathy for Steve Jobs, or people who agree with his baseless argument. Lest we forget, the *base* of the *entire* OS X operating system is a BSD core, something Apple didn't invent or innovate in to existance.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
At least Jobs does recognize the parts he owes to the community. Makes him slightly less evil, in my view.
But Jobs' perspective is biased. I can think of a desktop search engine that's out now - Google Desktop Search.
If anything, I'd say MS is copying/trying to catch up to Google.
"Microsoft, unyielding, relies on their own developers who are slowly (but rapidly gaining speed) migrating to the more stable Unix-based systems." So, Novell was kicked over and over for clinging on to their NetWare kernel - a closed source, proprietary mess that was a nightmare to code to. They finally saw the light and (a bit late) have adopted a Linux alternitave in buying SuSE. This, like the Apple stratagy opens them up quite a bit to say the least. When will folks realize "Hey, this Microsoft stuff is all closed up! Every other OS in the world is built on standards!" I predict that in a couple years, people will be making the same statments about Microsoft that they did about Novell 10 years ago - it is an antiquated, closed, and dead OS.
And didn't they establish then, that the whole damn lot of them "stole" the idea from Xerox.
The Apple GUI was derived from Xerox's original idea and by some of the Xerox team who defected. Meanwhile, we got GSX/GEM when yet another team member broke away from Xerox, and if memory serves Apple did battle with Gem over IP issues.
It could be argued (I stand to be corrected), that Windows was the only GUI not led by, or written by someone from Xerox...
Incidentally, Jobs started his "IT" career selling Wozniak's blue boxes designed to allow free lobg distance phone calls...
Here endeth the history lesson...
This comment was directed to a shareholder. This is nothing more than statements to fuel those backing Apple. Jobs wasn't complaining at all in his comments, in fact, he was boasting about Apples progress in direct comparison to M$... Good for him, I seem to recall Bill doing the same in the past. On another note. The creation and evolution (or copying if you feel this way) of different company innovations does nothing more than benefit consumers.
They ship more computers than Dell and have higher profit margins per unit shipped, I'd say Jobs has more than enough reasons to comment.
I think it should be emphasized that this statement was made a a stock holders meeting, as the representative Jobs needs to sound proactive and "on the ball" while I think MS does have the Apple photocopiers out, remember Steve was saying this in response and to reassure share holders that Apple is ahead of the curve.
The GUI is Xerox's idea, they had the basics, with drag and drop and clicking on icons, the desktop metaphor is Apples idea where you have a trashcan and folders and the finder.
Jonathanjk.com
Who says scaling is a requirement? It's a classic case where there are logical bounds - the screen size. Why would mixing interactive and non-interactive widgets be a problem? Web-browsers also do both. You don't clutter your desktop with ANY shit, that's the point. As soon as you are done with them, you dismiss them with the same key you brought them up with. Your method for running a calculator reqires seven keypresses rather than one. It also fails if any on the recent applications listed on the start button begins with R.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
The amusing part is the volume of people who give Apple a pass on every idea they copy or outright steal from others in the industry, and then do a 180 and say anyone building on Apple ideas is copying.
Is there really no room at all to accept and admit that the entire computing industry moves forward by building on the successful ideas of the industry as a whole? Copyrights and patents are one thing, but this kind of childish "hey, stop copying..." whining is what keeps Jobs from being taken seriiously as an adult.
I know this is a combination funny/troll post, but for those who have never used OS X, let me tell you--
Panther does file copies so quickly, that for smaller files I actually have to look in the destination to make sure the file is there-- it finishes the copy so quickly it doesn't even bother drawing the 'copying...' info window.
"Microsoft agreed to pay an unreleased sum of additional funds to quiet the allegations that it had stolen Apple's intellectual property in designing its Windows OS." - http://www.apple-history.com/frames/body.php?page= history§ion=h7
Some people believe 1-1=3 and for the sake of being politically correct, we should respect their differences
I think there are two aspects here.
One is purely performance/hardware, it has long been possible to do a free text search of all the contents of your computer (security issues aside - this is very hard to do securely in a multiuser environment if anyone cares about security/privacy), just no one could be bothered to sacrifice the amount of disk space, and CPU to do this historically. Thus this is purely a technology whose time has come, previously Microsoft and others were mostly indexing metadata (optionally, like you'd bother to switch it off these days, but 5 years ago you may well have chosen to), or select portions of the system.
When Google announced they were doing this I downloaded a free software product that already did this for GNU/Linux for comparison, and yes it worked, it also took about a day to index my system as root, doubled my disk space usage, and needed to refresh its indexes (which it chose to do overnight), and made everyones content visible (if only indirectly) to anyone who could query the database.
As such indexing is a natural progression of computing, but as any database person will tell you indexing has a big resource cost. These days no one cares if their 150GB hard disk is 20% used instead of 10%, and if writing a file takes 10000 operations instead of 100.
The other is integration, Apple as always have a truely innovative integration between search and desktop. I don't always buy their "usability" features (I like menus in the Window they relate to, saves a LOT of mouse mileage). But I think they probably have the edge here, and will retain it if only because of the relatively small application base installed on most Apple desktops.
Actually Apple bought NeXT several years ago. I guess they must have put some of the NeXT stuff to use somehow. The guy running NeXT got some senior management job or something, too. I think he even got his start at Apple back in the early 80's.
Death and danger are my various breads and various butters.
Not really a truce, so much as a "cease fire."
Look at some of the Apps which Apple has recently been pushing out: A web browser which saves them from reliance on IE, and two of the three programs they need to allow Mac users to abandon MS-Office for good. (They still probably need a spreadsheet program, and rumor has it that one is in development.)
This all comes down to a phone call between Jobs and Gates back when Jobs took over Apple. We are not likely to see a transcript, but a lot of folk suspect the conversation went along these lines:
"Hey Bill. It's Steve. Look, we've still got a shitload of lawsuits pending against Microsoft for all the stuff you've been brazenly stealing while I was off making digital cartoons, and now you've got the DoJ breathing down your necks and calling you a monopoly. How would you like to make both problems go away at once?"
"I'd be an idiot to say no, and I may be evil, but I'm no idiot. What are you proposing?"
"It's simple. This company has been run into the ground by morons for the past 10 years, and we need your 800-pound gorilla to prop us up for a while. We are prepared to put all these lawsuits behind us for good if you do the following:
1. Buy a bunch of non-voting stock in Apple. Say about $150 Million?
2. Make a public announcement that you intend to support the Mac with Office and Internet Exporer products for at least the next 5 years.
3. Pay us a small settlement to make our lawyers happy. Nobody has to know how much money it is.
In exchange, Apple will:
1. Not go out of business, which would have made it completely obvious that you really are a monopoly.
2. Pimp your web browser on our desktop... not that you haven't already pretty much already squished the competition.
3. Allow you to legitimately buy any of Apple's OS design ideas and technologies which you want to roll into your own (crappy) operating systems.
4. Mostly sell expensive machines to yuppie assholes, thereby not stepping on your toes in the general consumer market."
"Let's do it Steve."
"Oh one more thing... How would you like to appear as a guest on the Jumbo-tron at the next Mac trade show when I announce our deal?"
"Sound great... but... er... you're not going to make me look like that big evil face from the 1984 ad, are you?"
"Aw, come on Bill. Would I do something like that to you!?" (evil grin...)
Anyway, that's about it. The 5-year deal is over. Microsoft no longer needs to pretend they give a crap about OS X users, Apple is shipping affordable computers and developing home-grown replacement for most of the MS stuff which they customers used to use, the government heat is off Microsoft (at least in the US) and Apple is well in the black with and once again slowly growing marketshare.
It was a win for both sides to make the deal, and it's a win for both sides not to extend it. Jobs and Gates are cheerfully going right back to hating each other.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.