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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
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.
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."
Apple hasn't stolen Clippy yet. Well, I'm sure they've taken him, but they can't perfect him... it's just so goddamn hard to make something THAT annoying.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
...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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
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!
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.)
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"
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.
Why blast Vista? It is going to full of technological
breakthroughs and really is not that far behind schedule.
I hear it's going to be shipped any day now.
Sincerely,
Duke Nukem Forever
I'd say that a company being focused intently on its competitors is a staple of business, isn't it?
No, a company who copies instead of innovates is problematic.
Look, Apple takes good ideas from Microsoft and vice versa. And while we're at it, anyone seen all the stuff in xgl? Looks like that was copied much of all from Apple.
A good idea is a good idea. Microsoft has had some, Apple's had more, and sometimes the Linux world has them too... It's really silly to finger one as a copy cat when they all do it.
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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.
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.
When Apple steals from MicroSoft, they get it right.
When MicroSoft steals from Apple, it doesn't work as well, and it crashes the system even faster.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
It's just a little corporate trash talking. Lighten up.
That's good, because Apple stole Sidebar idea wholeheartedly from Konfabulator and other widget environments that predated Dashboard.
Christ... remember, kids, ideology is not just a point of view, it's a mental illness. Just say no. :)
I get a lot of flak from the Mac community and no doubt this article will start another round of name-calling. (See how Apple's childish behavior rubs off on its fans?)
Well, if you insist. How about "elitist, holier-than-thou prick who needs to be kicked in the nuts so hard he'll tea bag himself every time he sneezes." Howzat?
Man, I just have NO patience for pundits anymore.
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)
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. 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.
"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.)
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.
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.
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
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
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.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
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.
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.