Apple vs Microsoft- Who's the Copycat?

torrensmith writes "Paul Thurrott attacks the Apple Mac OS X Leopard Preview. He does have a few kind words for Apple and its leader Steve Jobs ("They do good work. It's too bad they feel the need to exaggerate so much.", but overall, he rips apart Apple for mimicking Vista, even going so far as to call the Apple fascination with Vista "childish." Paul does include a healthy review of the latest Leopard features, but quickly returned to his bashing of Apple. "

Comments

Rebuttal

[mrchaotica]

Two of the new features--Time Machine and Spaces--are valuable additions to OS X and worth discussing, though both, interestingly, have been done before in other OSes.

...But not by Windows. Time Machine goes way beyond Windows' System Restore, and is more similar to VMS's versioning filesystem. Spaces is just virtual desktops, yes, but Windows never had them either [from Microsoft] except for a half-assed "PowerToy."

Apple was inspired by Vista features like Spotlight (er, sorry, Windows Search) when creating its previous OS X version, Tiger

Spotlight is not like Windows Search. Spotlight uses metadata much more extensively, and is actually more similar in concept to the database filesystem that BeOS had 10 years ago and that Microsoft has been trying (and failing) to implement since about the same time. So yes, Apple "copied" it -- but from BeOS, not Windows.

By that measure, Microsoft has improved Windows by a far greater degree. In the same time frame, it has shipped [14 "different" Windows versions]. Heck, I might be missing some versions. No, they're not all major releases (The N Editions? Eh.) But XP x64, like Tiger on Intel, was a major engineering effort.

In terms of actual new functionality, all those add up to less than the amount of new functionality Apple has added to Mac OS X in the same time frame. Yes, SP2 was major, Media Center was major, Tablet PC Edition was major, and I'll allow his assertion that x64 was major. But that's it. All those other editions only differed in which combination of preexisting features they included.

And Apple has nothing--absolutely nothing--like the Media Center and Tablet PC functionality that Microsoft has been refining now for several years.

False. Apple has Front Row, which has much less functionality than Media Center, but is certainly not "nothing like" it. And Apple has something like "Tablet PC functionality" too. It's called Inkwell. The only reason nobody knows about it is that, since Apple doesn't sell a Tablet Mac, you've got to have a Wacom tablet to use it.

"They've been trying to ship a single release that's had many names [it's had one name, Vista, and one codename: Longhorn. --Paul]

That's not true; they've been "trying" to ship the features that Vista was supposed to have since about 1995 (e.g. a metadata filesystem), and still haven't managed to do so. So really, they've used every codename from "Chicago" to "Blackcomb" to describe all the functionality that Vista is supposed to have.

He said that Microsoft was ripping off Spotlight with Windows Search in Vista, which in fact, had been developed and publicly discussed long before Spotlight ever saw the light. (To be clear, Apple borrowed that one from Microsoft, but implemented it much more quickly.)

As I said before, the idea originally came from BeOS. Aside from that, the shortcuts Apple took to make Spotlight (i.e. it isn't actually part of the filesystem) resemble the steps Microsoft took when going from WinFS to Windows Search.

And then the rest of the article consists of Paul listing the things that he admits Microsoft copied. I'll omit those since I have no argument with them.

Re:System Restore != Time Machine

[masklinn]

No. Volume Shadow Copy is a backup utility, it's not file-grained (it works at the volume level, even though you can restore individual files), it's hand-triggered (Time Machine will more than likely be automatic, just as VMS' filesystem was in 1975), and it only allows you to create 512 images.

Time Machine is either a copy of VMS' versioning filesystem, or a copy of 20 years old Source Version Control tools retrofit to the job by removing features useless to regular end-users (commit messages, blames, ...) as it works on a per-file basis, saves full history and doesn't require user action to create new versions.

Re:Innovation isn't the same as invention

[NMerriam]

The miserable Dock is functionally very much like the WIndows 95 taskbar, the Finder and OS now handle file extensions about the same way Windows does, and so forth.

eh, you do realize that the Dock was built in NeXTSTEP in the 1980s, at the same time Windows 3.0 was being developed? Suggesting that it copied or was "moving towards" the windows taskbar half a decade before the taskbar existed is just silly. Especially since it behaves totally differently, being based on the principle that the user shouldn't have to care if an application is running. The windows taskbar was strictly a task switcher, although they bolted on the quick launch bar soon afterwards and have added support for application-specific context menu functionality to the task switcher. If anything, the taskbar has become much more like the dock over the years.

Similarly, filename extensions were inherited from the NeXTSTEP system, though I suspect you don't know much about how file types are handled in Mac OS if you think it handles extensions the same way Windows does. It has several layers of file typing, some based on unix methods (magic numbers), some based on the Mac OS legacy resource forks, and others that use straight extension mapping. The classic Mac OS also supported file extensions, they just weren't the preferred method of identification -- but as networks became more common in the 90s and other systems kept stripping the resource forks from files, extension mapping became more commonly used.

Regardless, it's not as if MS had anything to do with developing file extension behavior, they directly copied the function and behavior of CP/M, which copied from other systems going back several decades before Microsoft even existed.