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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. "
I think the headline should say "mocking" instead of "mimicking"
I don't give a damn who's copying who. If the features are useful and functional, then kudos to any developer of any system, (not even limiting myself to software here,) who adds those features to their system.
note: I am not a Mac user nor even a Windows user anymore.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
Sure, the features shown at WWDC were a bit underwhelming for us "ordinary folk." Although I do think that Time Machine looks amazing. There's going to be more, just be patient. Apple's not going to give away all the good stuff when there's still half a year until it's released.
It's stupid to ask if Microsoft or Apple is the one stealing from the other. Most ideas we see successfully implemented today are taken from somewhere else and (hopefully) improved. Take e.g. Spaces. Yes, there have been virtual desktops for Linux for years (and I've been using Desktop Manageron OS X for this purpose for some), but spaces is neatly integrated into Expose and viewing all virtual desktops in miniature versions the way Spaces does might even be new, at least I haven't seen it before.
So is it copied? Or is it invented? None of both, it is evolved. Yes, Windows can already make system snapshots like Time Machine. No, it cannot do it in a way that it can be easily managed by a normal user. Copied? Invented? If Vista brings a nicer interface similar to Time Machine, did they copy it back?
The originator of an idea is less important in a world where evolution is as important as with operating systems and GUIs. So these comparisons try to artificially generate a difference where none exists. My personal reference will be which implementation works best for me, not who came up with the inspiration.
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Its hard not to copy features when according to Microsoft vista will do everything but slice bread. Until its released you really can't say its being copied.
I'd say that a company being focused intently on its competitors is a staple of business, isn't it? That having been said- I would imagine that a company who is so famous for their ~vision~ would need more than anything that the public accept their products as original and innovative.
It's called marketing. Besides it plays into peoples perceptions of MS products. Even people who don't know why they should dislike Windows say they do because it's expected, Apples campaigns simply play into that.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
In the very first paragraph, he establishes what a horrible person Jobs is for competing with Microsoft. And I suppose David was an asshole for standing up to Goliath? Needless to say, he doesn't even mention Bill Gates throughout the entire article.
So then he goes on to attack the improvements over the past couple years:
He claimed that Apple shipped five "major" updates to OS X, including Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, and Tiger, though I'd argue that virtually none of those were major updates at all. (Unless you count the cost. At $129 for each version, that's about $750 on Mac OS X upgrades since 2001. That kind of puts the cost of Windows in perspective.) But he counted Tiger on Intel as a sixth major release, because of the effort in porting the OS X code to a new platform (which, actually, had been in the works for a long time and wasn't the 210 day project Jobs claimed).
By that measure, Microsoft has improved Windows by a far greater degree. In the same time frame, it has shipped Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional Edition, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (and 2005 UR2), Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, Windows XP Home and Professional N Editions, Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2, absolutely a big Windows upgrade), Windows XP Embedded, Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs, and Windows XP Starter Edition in various languages
Am I missing something? XP, XP, XP, XP... the only differences between most being software bundles, hardware compatibility, and driver support. and he fails to mention that pretty much all of those also have a price tag well over $100.
Thanks to the 64-bit Xeon chip that will be shipping in the new Mac Pro systems, Leopard will be fully 64-bit enabled (unlike Tiger, which is only partially 64-bit and then only on certain Power PC systems). That means that OS X will finally do what Windows XP x64 Edition did last year: Run 32-bit and 64-bit applications natively, side-by-side. Good for them.
So Windows released a seperate 64-bit version (which you have to buy seperately as well) before Apple. Again, no big deal. Almost every product on the market is starting to move towards 64-bit support. Is Apple really "copying" Windows here?
It seems to me that all these arguments are really week and that this guy just wants to complain about Apple. I really think he could've used his time more productively.
It's important for you to understand, however, that I don't have Leopard. I'm basing this only on what Apple showed off at WWDC.
Maybe you should try it before you knock it.
--
"A man is asked if he is wise or not. He replies that he is otherwise" ~Mao Zedong
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
A site specialized on Windows and with a strong relationship with Micrsooft bashes a competitor OS to defend Vista and make it look like the one that is truly original... I'm shocked! SHOCKED!
(yeah, I got the karma to burn)
Apple is a business trying to compete in a market dominated by a single organization with a 95% market share. Of course Apple is going to compare their operating system to Vista. It doesn't even really make sense to do otherwise. And a good way of attracting people is to flaunt your system's superiority. I don't really see it as elitism.
...if you look properly, it looks a lot like Microsoft is copying Apple. In the latest beta of Vista, progress meters shimmer. Windows slide into the taskbar when minimised. And practically everything glows when hovered over. Sound familiar, anyone???
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
Please, somebody tell Apple to put the Nuke button back where it belongs... on the other side of the window.
Denial ain't just a river in Egypt. While it's true that most features of either OS aren't completely new, there's a big difference between the way Microsoft and Apple incorporate them. Apple tends to create innovative new user interfaces (Time Machine) while Microsoft tends to copy features verbatim, even down to icon style and color schemes in some cases (some examples are given in the presentation).
Another key thing to note is WHEN each company incorporates new features. Apple tends to get things first (first in the sense of before Microsoft) and do cool new things with them while Microsoft tends to get them months or years later and does absolutely nothing new or innovative.
As for the Microsoft bashing during the WWDC it was well deserved. Microsoft deserves to be bashed for taking 5 years to develop a new OS and constantly delaying it while dropping many of its biggest features. And no matter how much you want to argue about Microsoft copying off Apple I hope you can at least agree that they're chasing after Apple's iPod and Google's web services like a little dog that got its bone stolen by a bigger one.
Most of the Mac kiddies like myself aren't really claiming that Microsoft is ripping off Apple in the biblical sense, just that Apple is the leader - the one daring to go where Microsoft probably would never have gone otherwise. If you want the latest and the greatest you have to love Apple and wait for Microsoft.
Haiku for you!
One Spotlight is not a rip off of windows search it is the natural progression from Sherlock released in os 8.0 in about 1998. Windows search is a less well implemented version of what Sherlock originally did for searching.
And what is up with his trashing of sherlock later as a tech destined for the trashheap... Windows and disabilty access to the OS... Ok Apple has been much more proactive through the years on this one, with text to speech support since at least OS7.
Overall I see alot of straw man attacks, yes there is a convergent evolution and you can make the point that Mac OSX has taken some ques from Vista, but How many more cues has Windows Vista taken from Mac OS, or how many things has Windows taken over the years? The start button is just a poorly implemented apple menu in os7 (after you could place the hd folder in the menu.)
read between the lines sure Apple took some things, but Microsost has taken more and after using both systems most people prefer the look, feel and use-ability of the MAC OS. For the record I own only PC's at this point.
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
Back at the CES, wasn't an MS exec hyping a slew of new features in Vista, all of which already existed in commercially available versions of OS X for several years? Someone has even made a video displaying OS X's features in sync with the audio of the supposed new features of Vista which wasn't publically released at the time.
I really don't want to humor the article by following the link because I suspect a Dvorak-ism going on here.
It's possible that they were MS ideas which Apple managed to beat MS to the market on those features by several years, but frankly, many of those ideas are likely from somewhere else.
The "spaces" feature is Apple catching up on the virtual desktop concept (was available as an XP PowerToy, but before then, was an X window feature), but none of the other introduced features seemed to be rips of Vista.
I'm not a Troll, it's reverse psychology.
Well known Microsoft supporter has a few bad words to say about Apple.
Ok, so which part of 'News for Nerds' does this come under?
apple.slashdot.com, where all stories are either spiteful media bias by trolls who want to get their hit-count up by groundlessly bashing Apple, or slavish fanboy posts by "Reality Distortion Field" victims who are lining up to drink poisoned Flavorade.
If you try to write a balanced story or comment about Apple, you will be accused of being both.
The facts:
Microsoft has frequently bought, borrowed or stolen all kinds of UI concepts from Apple, but generally doesn't do as good a job at implementing them for some reason. They have some very bright programming minds at Microsoft, but for some reason they are (and pretty much always have been) famously weak on design concepts.
Apple has turned around and taken a few UI tools from Microsoft as well (most notably contextual "right-click" menus, and the schedule integration they are rolling into the next version of Mail.app), mainly for the sake of meeting the expectations of OS "switchers."
My broad generalization of the trend:
When Microsoft takes from Apple, it's because Apple came up with a great idea. When Apple takes from Microsoft, it's because Microsoft has pushed a new industry standard on the market.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Funny how the World Wide Developers Conference was developer-heavy, huh?
Slashdot: where repeating an article in a post is "+5 Insightful"
Some ideas are good and are adopted by both, some fall by the wayside. I don't look in my garage at my Ford and my Toyota and freak out; "OMG! Both Vehicles have 4 wheels, 4 doors, and a steering wheel! The Toyota must be copyng the Ford!" It's just natural evolution. That's the best way to do stuff. Cars have been around for over 100 years and are for lack of a better term, a mature product. Personal compuers roughly 30. There's still a lot of great ideas out there that Mac or Windows or KDE or Gnome, or XFCE, etc etc. will come up with that will end up in the other systems.
That's how you build a product. Grab as many good ideas as you can and make them seamlessly work together.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
I love this little preemptive strike from his conclusion...
Gee, you conclude your column with a passive-aggressive insult. Of course, there's going to be another round of name-calling, Paul! You started it! Yeah, zealots are a fact of life when discussing operating systems, but you don't take the high road by sneering at the other guy's lack of elevation.
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Speaking as someone who does marketing for a living, my aim is to make my product appeal to people who don't already use it. Apple's strategy seems to be to patronize and insult the intelligence of anybody who doesn't drink the Cupertino cool-aid. Ask yourself how irritated you are by the smug patronizing Apple adds of late, thye've pretty much cured me of any desire to by a Mac.
Wow, way to take a totally reasonable statement about Apple's ability to meet timelines and turn it into a fanboi flame opportunity.
Yes, Apple's testing is easier with Apple hardware running Apple software. But consider that Apple hardware is now more than one arch, spanning a couple generations of Intel machines and many many generations of PPC machines, and you realize it is still a hard task, just as it is a hard task for ANY software vendor.
And the comment about Microsoft listening to feedback is simply there to imply that Apple doesn't listen to testers, which is pure, blatant fanboi shilling.
In summary: You added nothing to the thread besides demonstating your need to get into the Football mentality. If the 'other team' is compared favorably to 'your team' (regardless of the statement being fact, false or opinion) then you must do your part as a wanker and chime in.
When your product dominates the marketplace as Windows does, you can and should expect the underdog to take potshots at you. This is not considered bad behavior for an underdog. Microsoft doesn't publicly bash Apple because that would play in Apple's favor, not because of some odd sense of propriety. If Microsoft's people (Paul Thurrott) feel badly because their one desktop competitor bashes their product they seriously need to get a life and quit taking this personally.
I seem to recall that Apple ripped off Karelia's Watson for their search capability, not Vista. Both companies have a penchant for stealing features from each other and their own third party developers to bundle with their operating system. Anyone remember the Stacker/Doublespace fiasco? Netscape/Internet Explorer. Konfabulator/Dashboard. Watson/Sherlock. And let us not forget the Apple vs. MS look and feel lawsuit of 1988. Surprise! Apple and MS both ripped off Xerox! I'm sure there are many many more I coud add to this list.
In summary: It's perfectly acceptable to mock the incumbent; in addition, idea "theft" is practically a tradition in the operating system business.
Thurott's column is, IMHO, pretty much on the mark. In fact it seems to me that from about 1996 on, many of the things Apple has done have been, if not copying Wintel, nevertheless moving closer and closer to it. 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.
.mp3 players. I must have read two dozen reviews that all begin the same way: This could be the iPod killer. The reviewer always says that it has, you know, twice the storage, more features, longer battery life, a lower price, whatever. Then as the review goes on it becomes painfully obvious that the reviewer encountered a number of serious problems--invariably dismissed as "glitches." It wouldn't play, or it crashed, or it wouldn't sync properly to the PC, or it wouldn't play music that the reviewer had paid for. Invariably the reviewer mentions that despite having just as many knobs and buttons as an iPod, the menu system was difficult to use, and so forth.
.mp3 player they'd ever seen... because it was the first one that had been "perfected."
And, yes, Jobs' presentations are rather dishonest... starting from the day in 1984 when he pulled a Mac out of a bag and demonstrated things like MacinTalk, never bothering to mention that he was using a prototype Mac with 512K of RAM and that of his demos would run on the shipping Mac (which had 128K).
Still, it is important to recognize that what Apple has been good at is innovation, which is not the same as invention. Most of Apple's innovations were not invented by Apple, but Apple wrapped them up, made them work, gave them fit and finish, made sure they would work for your mom and not some geek in a lab.
To use an old-fashioned word, Apple is great at perfecting things.
This shows up particularly in the world of
To put it bluntly, the iPod was an Apple innovation. It didn't actually do anything that Creative and other companies hadn't been doing for years... but it worked, and people liked it, and for an awful lot of people it was the first
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
From TFA:
"In the same time frame, it has shipped Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional Edition, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (and 2005 UR2), Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, Windows XP Home and Professional N Editions, Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2, absolutely a big Windows upgrade), Windows XP Embedded, Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs, and Windows XP Starter Edition"
That's great. Not only are the 64 bit editions very unstable to this day (and shouldn't be counted as "released" until they are), the difference between all of these "releases" of Windows XP is which features were #ifdef'ed out of the pro version, which service pack they shipped with, and which drivers they shipped with. That's not a "release." I don't know anyone that would look at XP Starter Edition and say "Yes! What a great new release! A true engineering marvel!"
Besides, until we really see Vista as a released product, I'm not ready to compare it to the very first version of OSX, much less Leopard. Maybe it'll fall short of what OSX has always been, maybe it'll eclipse Leopard - I'll decide when it's released, but comparing a few tweaks for XP to the OSX releases is hillariously ignorant.
Nonsense. Driver availbility has grown significantly over the past year. Even then I was able to get drivers for everything except my printer, and they've released 64-bit drivers recently. I've found the x64 versions of Windows 2003/XP to be more stable than the 32-bit versions. I have never had a XP/2003 64-bit bluescreen (but I can't say the same about the 32-bit versions).
64-bit costs less probably because of the much lower demand. This will change with the launch of Vista and later Longhorn Server 64-bit.
It's necessary to have separate application/system paths because separate copies of libraries are needed for 32- and 64-bit applications. Some applications have/will have 32- and 64- bit versions because 64-bit apps cannot host 32-bit plugins directly.
Well as someone who is not so damn sensitive about things and looks at everything as some sort of personal insult, the latest Apple ads have made me laugh.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Both are copy cats in my book cause of the Amiga.
Yeah you thought it wouldn't be brought up.
No it won't, developers use versioning systems already and Time Machine is centralized single machine. Not enough for development needs, especially since it automagically commits and doesn't allow commit messages, or blames, or anything.
It's a "Joe Six Pack" end user feature, but of no use whatsoever to a good developer, because there are already existing and much better tools for that job.
Not really, there are at least two already, and they're fairly good. While having it nicely integrated in the OS with Apple's UI polish will be a very nice progress, anyone lusting for virtual desktops on OSX can get that already.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
That's as absurdly over the top as calling linux a "cancer." Has Microsoft ever labeled anyone a terrorist? Realize that the Gates's foundation (started in 2000) has helped the world more than any linux user. You sound ridiculous.
Note that I don't really care whether or not anyone from Microsoft has ever labelled anyone a terrorist. Nonetheless:
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a separate entity from Microsoft. Its activities, while they are financed, in large part, by Microsoft's success, have no bearing on the merit of Windows as an operating system or Microsoft as a company. To use its activities as a counter-argument to anything related to Microsoft is truly ridiculous.
Except for the fact that by all available accounts Vista is way behind schedule and full of bugs, just like every Windows release ever. I am not a typical Windows detractor. I use it at work every day and at home (Although I also use Linux and OS X.) But, the fact remains that Windows is always behind schedule, above and beyond what is typical for the industry, and Apple is usually far more punctual. I wouldn't be surprised if 10.5 beats Vista to market. I also wouldn't be surprised if 10.5 is actually *finished* when it does come to market. I would be *extremely* surprised if Vista is finished when it comes to market (It would be unprecedented in Microsoft history.) Or, if it comes out anywhere near the (currently) projected date (There would be no precedent for that either.)
Back in 1997, Steve Jobs got on stage at MacWorld and told the Mac faithful to get over it, the desktop war is over and Microsoft won. So why does Apple seem to want to promote the idea that Windows is copying a lot of things from OS X?
1. Perfection Required 2. Provocation Means Attention 3. Developer Motivation 4. Justifying Reverse Copying 5. The Next Wave All of these reasons add up to some very compelling reasons to do a little ribbing at Microsoft's expense. It's doubtful that any of this will stop before Leopard goes live, but it most certainly won't get worse. Apple isn't likely to venture into territories of slander or libel.That's funny... my current rig is an XP x64 system... and everything works just fine. I don't have a single device lacking drivers, from my digital camera to my scanner, and Belkin was even nice enough to provide me with the in-development drivers for the Nostromo n52 I have.
It's perfectly stable, I do all my development work on it, as well as my gaming. I've also yet to see it crash.
In my experience, people who claim that operating systems are buggy generally need to either figure out how to diagnose bad hardware, or buy better hardware from vendors that know how to write proper drivers.
The problem is using the word "steal." It implies illicit, underhanded or even criminal activity. Apple and MS (and Linux) don't steal from each other outright-- they're influenced by and react to each other's innovations. That's just good business, and it goes on everywhere-- for example when Buick first introduced turn signals to cars, don't you think Ford did the same one year later? And can you really call it "stealing" when they did so?
You make it sound like Microsoft has never had a good idea in its life, and that Apple only borrows from Microsoft when it has no other choice. This is not the case. "Time Machine," for example, is Volume Shadow Copy, except probably easier to implement. (Although this depends on how MS integrates it into Vista.) I'm not an expert in Apple's OS (I stick to Windows and Linux myself) but I'm sure if I did a little digging I could find plenty of genuinely insightful concepts created at Microsoft that Apple copied.
Everyone steals from everyone. The only real concern should be who presents the most user-friendly package without compromising security or reliability. If that package is also pretty, hey, all the better. Apple's done a much better job at this than Microsoft, although to be fair (from a security standpoint), Microsoft's user base is much larger, so those holes that are found receive much greater publicity and affect a lot more people--which has greatly aided the conception that Windows is not a secure OS.
I think the main reason Apple showed Time Machine is to encourage developers to support the relevant APIs to enable the "Time Travel experience" for their apps as well.
The keynote was vague; it is possible that every single file revision gets backed up. However, I think it is more likely the OS hook (used by Spotlight to notice changes to index) is the tool used by Time Machine to efficiently find what is needed for scheduled incremental backups. (I.e., every 12 or 24 hours, or whenever the backup volume gets plugged in, Time Machine can quickly retrieve files needing backup.)
How so? I mean it's very cool as a technology, but I don't see an immediate application beyond screensavers. (OK, maybe an updated iPhoto slideshow mode and some new Keynote transitions, too...)
0 1 - just my two bits
If this were a patent case, we would look at who had each idea first. This isnt about patents... it is about implementation. I don't care if Microsoft came up with the "Windows Search" idea in 2000... or 1995... or 1985. The bottom line is that while Microsoft has been talking about desktop search for years, Apple went and actually did it a few (two?) years ago.
Lets look at another example. The Microsoft PowerToy for virtual desktop's dates back a decade (all the way to NT 4). I've used it a few times over the years and I have to say that it sucks. It works... but it sucks. If the MS people had just updated and integrated it into Windows with XP, Apple would not have been able to make such a big deal. What was stopping them? Its an excellent bussiness tool. Frankly I am annoyed that Apple too SO long to come out with virtual desktops. Linux has had them for what seems like forever, and there are already several (free) third-party virtual desktop solutions for the Mac.
Aqua vs. Aero?? Who cares. Maybe Aero was "thought of" first... Aqua has been in production for half a decade (something like that). If Aero was first, them congradulation to Apple on a great preemptive marketing strike.
Widgets and Gadgets. This is pure evil on both sides. Apple ripped the Widgets from Konfabulator. That program was GREAT, I even purchased a license. I was pretty annoyed that Apple did'nt even compensate the original innovator. Microsoft ripped it off of Apple... so I guess Apple deserved that.
The point I am trying to make is that in the end it doesnt really matter who came up with what idea first. The credit goes to the first to market. Welcome to economics... companies release NEW products, or BETTER products. Anything else is just market saturation. On another note, maybe Microsoft will wise up and stop discussing new enchancements 5-10 years before they go to market. Any other company would go out of bussiness by laying their cards face up on the table like that!
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
It looks very similar to the fancy animations the accompany "fast user switching".
Let us presume that as a typical multitasker, you've got 9 or 10 terminals, a web browser, a hexeditor, a tex viewer, a pdf viewer, xchat, a debugger, and email open. I don't know why-- perhaps you like to write Latex documentation and code at the same time. The email is open because it's email. The web browser and acrobat-- for consulting API manuals. Xchat for collaboration. Even though you have a large monitor, some of those windows are going to obscure others.
You could categorize the apps to together by task, and assign a virtual desktop to each task, if you were running linux or freebsd. But on the mac, all the windows are on one screen. Expose allows you to temporarily shrink all the windows to fit on one screen without overlaps.This doesn't help much with terminal or xterm windows (at a distance bash shells all look alike), but it will allow you to pick out the emacs window, or the mail window, or safari quite quickly.
Job's philosophy seems to be that housekeeping is best left up to the computer. Virtual desktops force you to think "this is how I want to arrange my workspace". Sometimes virtual desktops are optimal, but sometimes they just get in the way.
My broad generalisation:
When Apple "steals from Microsoft", they're just reimplementing ideas that either a) already exist in multiple alternative products, or b) are blatantly obvious improvements to existing technology.
When Microsoft "steals from Apple", they're just reimplementing ideas that either a) already exist in multiple alternative products, or b) are blatantly obvious improvements to existing technology.
As for other items such as the search being stolen entirely from MS. Well I'm not sure how any one can own the idea of a "quick search" using methods that we're accustomed to on the internet. The difference being that MS has rattled on that they'll have the feature for 10 years now and never delivered it. So it's hardly "copying" MS on a feature that has not only never been delivered, but cancelled for the foreseeable future.
Ideas like spaces have been around for a while, it's how it's implemented in OS X which is clever, you only need as much memory as to support the applications, the application windows move, not the desktop.
As for other features like stationery, I wouldn't rattle on too much about the use of themes on internet mediums, as the concept of templating is hardly an original one.
My point here is that a lot of the added features are obvious or a natural evolution of their existing products. It is easy to compare these to MS, but it's hardly copying. The keynote presentation held by apple which highlighted the similarities between vista and 10.3+10.4 etc took only the most blatant examples where MS has been a tad bit unoriginal and directly copied the visual interface, down to the colour scheme used and program nomenclature.
Overall I think Paul just needs to be a bit more like MS and take it on the chin, everyone gets haggled in this industry, it's pointless trying to refute points which only show his lack of research and his genuinely blinded zeal for MS products. Paul only throws in the occassional lucid counter argument merely to appear less biased than what he is, unfortunately the giant scope difference between his pro-apple and pro-ms remarks show his lack of genuineness. That and his logo & style guide are a rip-off of Microsoft graphic design circa 1998.
Speaking as someone makes a living by understanding and interpreting precise meanings in words and images, I must inform you that you missed the boat with those commercials.
You could make a convincing argument that commercials were in some cases insulting to the users. Even though I don't agree with it in most cases, I'll admit that that's a defensible interpretation. However, I don't see how you could take those commercial as an insult to any computer user. Every ad starts like this:
Mac: "Hi. I'm a Mac." PC: "And I'm a PC."
They are not computer users, but anthropomorphizations of computers - basically, what those machines would look like if they turned into a human beings. PC is bookish, formal, and slightly high maintenance. Mac is an easygoing, modest person, but who nonetheless has the smugness around the edges that is often unavoidable in a true genius.
Basically, as the typical PC user in the audience, you're engaged in a conversation with two people - someone you barely know, and someone you both know pretty well. In this kind of situation most of the time you naturally focus on something you have in common (PC) and start to banter about their foibles and shortcomings. They're banking on the fact that most people have a love/hate relationship with their PCs - that while these people like them, they get viruses, they're needlessly complicated to put together, they have compatibility problems with some digital cameras, etc.
The remainder of the audience is people who hate PCs (who are either Mac users already, Unix users or luddites) and people who love. Among these are informed users who've used Macs and have good reasons to not use them. Then there are those who love them so blindly that they cannot see their problems, and among these are those who have spent so much money on a purchase they're unsatisfied with that they are defensive about it and get vicariously insulted whenever anyone points out that it has flaws. Example:
Man buys shoes for incredible amount of money. Man wears shoes for a while and discovers they're slightly too small, but it's too late to take them back. Rather than simply giving up, man sets out to prove that shoes are, in fact, perfect, and ends up blistering his feet horribly in the process. After this, any suggestion that the shoes are, in fact, too small, is met with bitter disagreement and vain argument that they're just the right size and will loosen up in a few weeks.
I would wager that you fall into that category.
Actually, Apple did more than just copy BeFS and its "DB-like" filesystem metadata facility. They hired the former Be, Inc., engineer who designed BeFS and the cool system of "live queries" that would update in real time as the file system changed. The engineer's name is Dominic Giampolo. As I understand it, Dominic has contributed extensively to HFS+, including the journaling support. He's written a book on file system design too, so this guy can be fairly described as knowing the problem domain pretty well.
Since BeOS is now defunct, I'm glad that Apple absorbed one of the cooler technologies from that OS (which I was an early developer for -- my BeBox is now living in Tucson with a friend). I hate to see good ideas wither and die for lack of a platform. The implementation might not be identical to that in BeOS, but it certainly behaves in much the same way for the end user. I should also point out that both BeFS and HFS+ with Spotlight do pretty much what WinFS promised to do -- except that WinFS now is no longer slated to be included in Vista, and in fact may only ever live in future releases of MS SQL Server.
Even if Apple hadn't absorbed the engineering talent to make this feature possible, Paul Thurrott would still be off-base in claiming that Apple "stole" spotlight from Vista. After all, Vista is still unreleased software, and is still in a state of flux (e.g., features are still being adjusted and, just recently, some were dropped, such as WinFS). It takes a lot of chutzpah to claim that a shipping product "stole" features from a product that still isn't available for sale. (I guess there's room to argue here, but to me, it seems clear that Vista is still vapor for most rank-and-file users.)
I'm writing this as someone who briefly worked for Metrowerks on their BeOS suite of compiler tools, and I met Dominic twice -- once while working for Metrowerks, and once at Comdex at Be's booth. He's a great guy.
There are few ideas that are original to either Microsoft's or Apple's products. Most of their software features have either been acquired, copied from other products, or are based on academic work. And that's perfectly OK, that's the way things are supposed to work.
OS X, in particular, is, from the ground up, a copy of other people's ideas, technologies and software: the Mach kernel, the Cocoa GUI, Objective-C, gcc, vector graphics GUIs, hardware desktop graphics acceleration, the BSD userland, RSS, tabbing, smart folders, mouse sensitive corners, virtual desktops, translucency, shadows, desktop search, mail reader spam filtering, desktop widgets--you name it, it almost certainly was invented and implemented somewhere other than at Apple first. But that's OK: Apple makes good choices in what they copy and they implement it well.
In some sense, part of Microsoft's problem is that they aren't copying enough. When Microsoft copies stuff from other people, they are usually successful with it. When Microsoft comes up with something original, they often fail. The reason why a lot of their "innovations" aren't widely used in the market is not because nobody thought of them before, it's because they didn't work well when other people tried them before.
It doesn't bother me that Apple is not innovative; I think their focus on design and copying proven technologies actually makes their systems better. What bothers me is that Apple isn't doing their share to fund innovation. Microsoft is investing heavily in research, both in their own research labs and grants to universities. Those investments don't necessarily lead directly to Microsoft products, but they make sure that 10-20 years from now, there will still be innovations for people to use. Apple is a bunch of cheapskates; they don't have a research lab and they don't support research or education at universities. Apple should be ashamed when they try to pass themselves off as "innovative".
What does it matter if businessmen use Apple solutions or not? Why hold them up as paragons of taste and class?
I think the parent was simply referring to the fact that people use computers every day in their workplaces, but we don't see Apple ads featuring Macs in the workplace.
As for businessmen as a class of humans not worthy of any respect, your examples seem to be pulling almost exclusively from the excesses of the worst Fortune 500 size companies. Small business fuels the economy:
I have a hard time believing that the people who run most of the businesses in the United States are worthy of such scorn. Painting all businesspeople as vile creatures is akin to saying that all athletes take steroids, all programmers crack DoD systems, and all (pick an ethnic background) are criminals.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I'm downright startled by the volume of pure, unadulterated asshattery evidenced in Thurrot's article. Some of his strongest "points" are just dead wrong.
His comments that Windows had simultaneous 32-bit and 64-bit support "last year" in XP x64 Edition is just laughable. Anyone who actually attempted the upgrade to find missing drivers, and then that their 32-bit licence had been invalidated by the attempted upgrade, will be heartily rolling their eyes at that one.
When he talks about "Spaces" he mentions that Microsoft at one point put this into a version of NT long before to support his claims that Microsoft did all this stuff first, and then he mentions Linux. Linux has had a multiple-desktop pager solution available for pretty much as long as I can remember (which is a long ways back). Microsoft invented what again?
He repeatedly attempts to imply that OSX's GUI widgets are rip-offs of Vista's "glass" theme, somehow without noticing that Apple has had Aqua just about forever now.
Is this guy campaigning to work for the Bush administration or what?
It's a "Joe Six Pack" end user feature, but of no use whatsoever to a good developer, because there are already existing and much better tools for that job.
You completely missed the previous poster's point. Time machine is a technology and API that can be integrated into any application. Thus, developers writing programs that want to manage versioning or just tie into it the filesystem versioning generally, can integrate their applications with the feature. In photoshop you can use "undo" to walk backwards through your document, even to a point before you last saved the file. Developers will be quite happy to be able to easily implement this same feature in a plethora of other applications.
As for developers using time machine directly with the filesystem, well some will find it easier than running a local CVS server. Also, Leopard includes subversion and we have no idea yet as to the integration between time machine and other versioning systems, or even if time machine will allow commit messages and the other traditional features of versioning systems.