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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. "
The features shown at WWDC were generally features developers want, and hints at the technology under them:
(I'm not saying all the features shown appeal only to developers, of course, just that Jobs and crew knew their audience. Many of these features appeal to other groups, too: iChat, Time Machine and Mail clearly appeal to other computer professionals who spend their job working on a Mac. WebClip will appeal to even casual users.)
As a person who uses Windows XP x64 at work everyday I have to disagree. It is every bit as stable as the 32bit counterpart if not more stable. It is based on the Windows 2003 Server codebase and is very reliable and responsive. Drivers are avaliable from most major hardware verndors for new stuff and some old stuff as well. 32 bit Apps work just fine from anywere you want to launch them from. They just have the seprate Program Files paths for convinience. I prefer the X64 version over the 32bit version any day of the week. Don't knock it till you try it.
The idea of snapshots is nothing new and has been around MUCH MUCH longer than Volume Shadow Copy. Apple is not copying it from MS, they (like MS) are taking an old idea that has been in volume managers and storage systems for many years and implementing it. Network Appliance has had an awesome snapshotting system since the mid / late 90's (not exactly sure when it started, but I was using it in 98.)
Yup, VMS had autoversioning of files way back when, but it was the Apple Lisa(tm) that had a GUI based file versioning system. When you created a document, an icon was created that looked like a page. When you editted the document, pages where added to the icon that looked stacked. You could easily go back to any prevision version. (This may have been copied from the Xerox Star system out of PARC that Apple copied.)
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Speaking as a mac user, I too, was unimpressed. What everyone seems to continually forget is that Jobs also said that there were "top secret" features. The reality is, we still have no idea what's in leopard. Personally, I'm afriad of feature bloat right now.
I think that all Jobs was trying to accomplish with the demo was to give developers an idea of leopard's power and show them what kinds of things it can do. He showed developers how the address book tied into time machine to give them an example of the kinds of things timemachine can do. He also did it to show them how they could take advantage of it in their own applications. Once he did the demo of the addressbook, he included a few new features in mail to go along with it. With Core Animation, all he wanted to do was show developers what kinds of things it could do. Finally, the whole point of the iChat demo was to show developers what kinds of things leopard is capable of.
People are thinking too hard about the leopard demo. The demo was only supposed to be a display of a few of the technologies that are in it. We still know nothing about what leopard is and what it isn't.
--- Don't ever trust a woman until she's dead- B.B. King
Careful, Gates calls people with ideas like yours "Terrorists."
No he doesn't. And as far as I'm aware, he never has in the past, either.
I realize that Gates-bashing and Microsoft-bashing are popular pastimes here at Slashdot, but maybe we could limit our attacks to things that they have actually done or said?
Well-said. I can think of a great example. Alt-Tab switching I think first appeared on Windows. So Apple implemented it as Command-Tab switching, BUT they improved it. Once the (much better-looking) bay of icons respresenting open programs comes up, if you continue to hold down Command, you can use Command-backquote to iterate backwards through the open windows. Or, if you start by hitting Command-Backquote, the task switcher automatically goes into iteration through the foreground application's open windows. So a combination of keystrokes easily can bring a background application's background window to the fore, with a caveat: in the Apple task-switching world, hidden windows don't come up for iteration, but on the whole, I think it's much cleaner than MS's implementation. I find that I rarely need Expose do to its efficiency.
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It's a fine line, but Apple is so far over that line it's not even funny. Whether you call them elitists, fan-boys, or "the Mac Faithful", it all boils down to Apple catering to a group of people who's default position is that everything Apple and all apple users are awesome while everything launched out of Microsoft and all microsoft users couldn't possibly be as good.
Apple itself has not always taken this elitist position. Didn't Jobs take a $150 million investment from Microsoft and put IE on all Macs for years? However, their recent ads have been designed to make PC users look like bafoons while Apple users bask in, really, an entirely different plane of computer use. I can't think of a more classic definition of elitism.
Answer me this, when in the modern Mac era has apple ever showed it's computers being used by buisnessmen in ties or blue-collar types playing games with their kids? I'm not saying that not being a "company of the people" automatically makes them elitist, but really it doesn't help. Macs are featured as being used by people smarter, hipper and better looking than you or me (well, me anyway). These people are elite. If Apple ever want's to be considered anything but elitist, they can start by showing ads of a receptionist using a Mac. Or is that just too... common?
TW
For example, pretty much everyone "knows" the Apple got a lot of GUI ideas from Xerox. What is probably less understood is how much the original Apple engineers did (I am including people who they hired from Xerox) to improve on the basic ideas they saw. There are a lot of things we take for granted, which the Apple people had to come up with (even basic things like a reliable way to have working overlapping windows, which Xerox didn't really have working).
That's my only problem with the "Oh, but Apple ripped off the GUI from Xerox" defense of Microsoft. There is a significant difference between how Apple and Microsoft approached things. When the Apple guys went to see the stuff at Xerox, it inspired them and they took what they saw and then used it as the basis for a lot of original ideas and enhancements to what had come before. On the other, Bill Gates' big obsession with the Windows guys during its initial development was just to make Windows "work like the Mac". That is, Gates didn't seem to really be pushing his guys to come up with new GUI ideas, etc. or push things forward. He wanted to just replicate the Mac.
That really strikes me as the fundamental difference between Xerox and Apple and Microsoft. Xerox PARC was doing some amazing stuff, but Xerox didn't seem to know what to do with it or have much interest in really bringing it to the masses. Apple was inspired by the Xerox PARC work (Smalltalk in particular), and took it and used it as the foundation to develop a really mainstream GUI concept for the masses. But Microsoft was focused more just on crushing the competition and coming up with a decent enough replica of the existing GUIs.
So, that's my problem with using "But Apple stole it from Xerox" as a defense. It basically makes it sound like there was this single monolithic "GUI" concept that was developed at Xerox, stolen and implemented exactly by Apple, and in turn stolen and implemented by Microsoft. And this just isn't true.
I've been following Thurrott for years, back when I was a Windows user. He likes to trot out the "I'm level-headed, I bash Microsoft myself" card, but then he'll sideswipe you with something crazy like some Mac userbase insult or a claim that XP SP2 was a bigger update than an entire major release of OS X (his reaction to the Arstechnica article on OS X Tiger was to claim that Ars writers are wordy and self-important, as if that's relevant to the facts in the piece).
Best-informed? The guy once argued with me that Spotlight was inferior search technology because it used plugins to read third-party document formats. I kindly pointed out that Microsoft's search tech uses the same damn thing, called IFilters, because search tech isn't psychic and has to know how to read things. He never replied. It was at that moment that I realized he's not a developer and doesn't understand things from that perspective. He's more of a Dvorak. You mention CoreData or CoreAnimation, and it's in one ear and out the other.
"Sufferin' succotash."