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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."
Search: Tiger will feature a built-in local search technology called "Spotlight" (technology built upon the search engines that Apple currently uses to search iTunes and e-mail). Microsoft has said it plans to offer a similar local-machine search engine for Longhorn that will be based on the company's Windows File System (WinFS) technology.
Scripting:Tiger will include a front-end scripting environment known as "Automator." Longhorn will include a new scripting shell (currently in beta test) known as "Monad."
Built-in RSS support: Tiger will embed an RSS aggregator into the Safari browser. Longhorn will include an embedded RSS feature in the user interface.
Info-Display Panel: Tiger will have an information-display capability called "Dashboard." Longhorn will have an information-display panel called "Sideshow," to which users can "pin" collections of items of interest.
Integrated Instant Messaging/Video Chat: Tiger will feature a souped-up version of iChat. Microsoft will embed Windows Messenger (a sister to MSN Messenger), which also will likely feature video-chat.
64-Bit Support: Tiger will include extended 64-bit capabilities. Longhorn allegedly will be optimized for 64-bit systems.
As many an Apple advocate has pointed out, Tiger is set to debut at least a year before Longhorn. That's a pretty significant head start, especially for folks who have no corporate edicts, application constraints or other limitations on which hardware/software platform they choose.
Nazi Pope Emblem
"More shameless... ...pointing fingers..."
Welcome to 1982-1984.
If M$ had a customer base as small as Apple's, I'm sure they'd be able to put out new releases every six months as well.
Apple's putting out new major versions about every 18 months these days.
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.
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
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?
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.
They licensed the GUI and the mouse from Xerox. Stop getting your knowledge "out of the air" and look it up. Xerox was paid a significant amount for them, including apple stock.
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.
The only solution to such rampant disregard for originality is obvious: we need stronger intellectual property laws and more protection for software patents. Obviously, the current laws provide no incentive for Microsoft to innovate at all, and therefore we must protect Apple's ideas and creations by giving them a guaranteed mononpoly for a limited time - perhaps as long as 70 years - to force competitors to develop new and alterantive solutions.
/sarcasm tag.
Oh, I almost forgot to close my
Isn't Apple Microsoft's market research department?
Deleted
(You cannot even post without being anonymous, shows you stand by your comment) . Why is this falsehood still presented as fact? Apple licensed the GUI from Xerox but MS copied their desktop metaphor from Apple. How many times does it need repeating until the trolls and the uninformed shut the fuck up and bring different points to the table?
Jonathanjk.com
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)
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.
We all know Apple invented the ... Media Center PC, PocketPC, XBox, ...
Yeah, they're called Mac TV, Newton, and Pippin.
-Bb
Those of us not born yesterday remember Bill Gates vaporware announcement of "Windows" soon after the original Mac came out. The first usable version of Windows was version 3.1 released in 1993, nine years after the original Mac OS. Windows was a shameless imitation of the Mac OS (both copied Xerox OS). MicroSoft had a year headstart in working with the MacOS because it wrot important Apps like Multiplan.
TabletPC
Newton ...
Media Center PC
Except for TV, any Mac with iLife ... and there was an Mac with a TV tuner built in ...
Pocket PC
Newton again ...
XBox
Pippin ...
To mention nothing of Palm, ReplayTV/Tivo, Nintendo, and so on. Not one of these "innovations" from MS is truly innovative. Perhaps the only innovative item above is the Newton, and Alan Kay had the idea with his Dynabook first.
Copying is usually how progress happens. Even the most innovative product is build upon prior ideas.
SteveM
Then how do you explain this quote from The New York Times?:
"In the suit, filed last Thursday, Xerox accused Apple of unlawfully using, in two of its computers, copyrighted Xerox software that controls desktop computers. Xerox also argues that Apple has undermined Xerox's ability to license its own software widely by suing two other companies marketing similar software."
The suit was eventually thrown out and perhaps Apple bought a license later, but it's clear that Xerox believed their interface had been stolen.
By the way, in those days it was often assumed that copyright covered not only source code, but "look and feel" as well.
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.
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!
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.
Oh, I almost forgot to close my /sarcasm tag.
...
That would suck. Then the whole rest of this page would be sarcastic too
Yeah, close call.
Xerox was paid apple stock for apple to look at the stuff that Xerox did not care about.
soo...
how is that stealing?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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."
You make me laugh, really hard, too. This is Slashdot, you know, you shouldn't say such assinine things like the Dock comes from the taskbar. Let's see a raise of hands for everyone who knows where the Dock comes from.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
The Mac OS X dock is a clone of the NeXTSTEP dock, which predates Windows 95.
./ a few months back.
In fact, much of Mac OS X's interface is strikingly similar to that of NeXT, as is evident from those videos that were posted to
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.
Interface builder? Yup, Interface objects stored in .nibs? Yup. Has a dock? Yup. Has a Shelf? Yup. Implements the Open Step API? Yup (Cocoa). Uses Objective C? Yup. System objects start with NS? Yes sir.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.