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Apple vs Microsoft Both Copycats
jdbartlett writes "Yesterday, we read Paul Thurrott's response to Apple's Leopard preview. In his TechBlog, Jim Thompson trims Thurrott's bloated opinion piece and presents an alternative take on four major new features, admitting that each may have been inspired but certainly not by Microsoft. Thompson ignores 6 features; some (Core Animation, Accessibility improvements) needed no defense, but perhaps not all Thurrott's points were invalid."
And MS didn't start printing banners. When Apple got a $150 million dollar bailout, they lost all credibility when it comes to taking pot-shots at MS.
Does anybody really care if one of them copied the other?
Maybe Apple/Microsoft because they want to fight out patents. Personally, all I care about is which one does a better job of implementing the features I want.
The argument that Thurrott advanced was that Microsoft had some of these features first. He doesn't claim that Microsoft was the inventor of those features. So along comes Thompson and outlines how various things in Unix did it first. Well, that's nice. But the debate here is between Windows and OS X, not Unix.
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So when MS does it, it's copying. When Apple does it, it's for the benefit of the users. Riiight... Double standard anyone?
Seeing the itemized list of who's providing what, made me think about why everyone thinks their "allegiance" is the one to do it right and to do it first. In general I think the trend is:
That probably sounds negative to any of the three groups, but I think it explains more about why users don't "remember" that someone else perhaps did it first. An Apple aficionado who appreciates good user interfaces will never acknowledge anyone else as coming "first" after seeing the demo of Time Machine; there's just never been anything like it. But a Unix user will guffaw at the crash they had during the demo and state that they're the ones with the "first" version since they really see reliability as their cornerstone. As for adamant Microsoft users, it just seems to matter about when something was released rather than the quality. The next version may completely drop the interface or re-engineer the back end. But often these users can quote feature lists and continuity better than most Trekkies or Whovians.
In a lot of ways, I think there's a lot to be improved from all three camps. Make it work. Make it usable. And make it known. I think there are things each developer group can learn from the other, but advocacy will be self-selecting.
Everyone copies everyone. Microsoft copies Apple copies Linux copies Microsoft copies... you get the picture. If they want to be successful, they really have no choice. Consumers see a great new feature in one OS, they're going to start whining that theirs doesn't have it. So whoever writes that OS has to grit their teeth, suck it up, and copy that feature. Or alternatively, they can find a way to implement the feature in a way that's so much better, that whoever introduced it first is forced to turn around and copy THEM.
Copying is great for the consumer because it means we'll pretty much all get those snazzy features sooner or later. And if we don't, we'll just move on to whatever's better at the moment. Hooray for copycats!
They probably modded you as troll because of the link to your blog. There are ads at the bottom and the mod assumed that the primary reason you posted the ad was to generate traffic, not necesarilly contribute to the thread. Now, I have no idea what your intentions were, or whether the mod actually followed that line of reasoning, or whether the mod itself is a random troll or even a mistake (misclicked, intended to click another type of mod or even carelessly modded to wrong poast.) I'm just giving a possible reason for the mod.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Well, I don't know about the argument, but I'd certainly mod the blog post about that. I love how arguments can just magically be dismissed nowadays by being 'FUD' (most overused acronym on Slashdot now?). "Hey, I don't agree with this guy - he's just trying to spread FUD!"
That's really the gist of his argument. Apple is claiming 6 'major' releases since 2001, and Thurrott is pointing out that by the same standard Microsoft has released many 'major' releases as well. I like how your quote omitted "By that measure" at the very beginning - it certainly changes things in favor of your point of view.
Umm, so your rebuttal is that the interface on the Microsoft feature allegedly sucks? His point is that Microsoft did something similar in the past - you're not addressing that at all.
Yeah, I guess you didn't read the part where he said "...Apple was inspired by Vista features like Spotlight (er, sorry, Windows Search).... But that's not a slam, really. Give Apple some credit for getting to market first--by a long shot--and doing a fantastic job of implementing features that Microsoft, frankly, may never get right." Windows search was announced long before Spotlight was implemented. Whether Apple necessarily borrowed the idea or not isn't as much the issue as the fact that Microsoft didn't borrow it from Apple - which is the point he's trying to make.
When it involves a new feature for Dashboard it sure does.
Overall you did a good job of selectively quoting material in such a manner as to cause Fear, Unvertainty and Doubt in the minds of...well, nobody with a grade 10 education.
This is the part of all this nonsense I don't understand.
Making a nice interface onto a backup system (Time Machine) - yes, great. Tooltips, even - yes (read Alan Cooper on this - I can't be bothered to argue). Stuff like that is innovative and worth talking about.
Stuff like "Oh, we invented the 64-bit OS" or "We were the first to integrate wifi into our computers" - who gives a toss? Both are stepwise/obvious improvements to any competent practitioner in the field.
Oooh, you thought of using a 64-bit CPU to run your OS? How ever did you think of that? I mean, first we had 4 bit CPUs, then 8-bit, then 16-bit, then 32-bit...but you came out of left field and decided to use a 64-bit CPU? Fantastic!
You thought of putting another peripheral inside the main box?! Awesome!
I'm not having a go at you in particular, brokeninside, - 'you' here means anyone who claims to be first with such improvements and claim they're more amazing than they really are. It always seems a bit "I'll piss on your boots and tell you it's raining" to me.
The whole 'first' thing is kind of dumb. I once pointed out to a tedious Mac fan who had a website detailing just how great and 'first' Apple were with everything, that contrary to his belief, Mac OS was not the first OS to support anti-aliased fonts - Acorn's RISC OS pre-dated it, for one. He then told me that Apple were 'the first to make it mainstream'. Typical fanboy - when you come up against contradictory facts, just change your criteria.
(Apologies if I sound cranky - can't sleep...)
Looking on the horizon, it seems to me that early 2007 will determine the next five years of the computing industry. If Leopard is introduced on time in conjunction with an office suite (Microsoft or a truly comparable replacement) and the Adobe Suites as native applications, Microsoft is in serious trouble. Apple will have delivered on all of their promises; the industry will have supported their move in the form of third party applications, and Microsoft is going to look slow and stupid. Vista is going to suck early - there's no doubt about it. They're already talking about things they are "saving" for SP1.
When all of this happens, the other shoe will drop when business owners and business managers begin asking: Why is there no search feature on our corporate network that works like Spotlight on my kid's computer? Why is it so difficult for our marketing department to create a podcast, when my nephew can do it on his laptop in 15 minutes? Why do my wife's e-mails look better than the ones from my office? Why can't I get that spreadsheet back like I can on my computer at home? I can't video conference?! My kids do it all damn night on their computers!
Apple is trying to reach out and grab the teenage and college demographic, because no matter how smart an adult thinks they are, they never want to look stupid or "old" to their kids. If Apple can pull it off, it will be the beginning of the post-Windows era, when Microsoft's marketshare falls below 75%, the competition heats up, and software companies begin to deliver programs that actually save time and money for everyday office work.
I'm not sure I really care though.
This simple fact is Apple delivered through on their tech promise. People seem critical of the 'cards close to the chest' attitude at times from Apple but it seems to work out a lot better than the MS Vista approach. Lots of promises, fewer in the delivery, stuff to come later (i.e more promises). Spotlight/Windows search is a perfect example, if they were talking about it in Jan 2004, why aren't we using it now or why isn't it shaping up to be better than Spotlight?
Yeah, but at least Apple hired the original engineers :-)
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
What's impressed me most between the two companies is which one keeps their promises. Microsoft promises all kinds of things in Longhorn/Vista and then slowly strips them out and delays them.
Apple usually doesn't say anything until they've already got the particular feature working. When they do pre-announce things they almost always come through. The one exception I remember is when they promised 3GHz G5s. Whether it's because of that failure or not, Apple switched to Intel after they failed to deliver on that one.
Despite comments about Apple and marketing, they don't suffer from the marketing-wags-the-company disease that seems to have infected most of the tech industry.
Clunky, horrible UI but with the germ of a good UI hidden within
You had such a great opportunity for a pun but wasted it on a wheat metaphor with that extra 'r', considering the history of GEM.
I'm shocked at the barrage of attacks on Apple over the last few days. Seems like the keynote struck a nerve with the PC world and Slashdot has taken the side of the attackers. I've used Microsoft products almost exclusively since the late 80s but in the last two months started the migration to Mac and I couldn't be happier. I don't care about statistics I care about real world use and Mac programs rarely crash. Windows apps constantly crash. For me case closed. For the first two months I rarely used the OSX built in applications but I'm using them more and more every day. I've never seen anything like them on any release of Windows and Leopard blows away Tiger. I can install software without closing open applications because of their mirror install system and I generally keep a dozen or more apps open. The hardware is excellent and the OS is stable. OSs are like religion so people feel they have to depend theirs. Personally I'm a heretic. I'll use what works. Mac works and Windows simply doesn't. I was promised XP Pro was more stable but it's no more stable than Win 2000. I spend half my time with XP turning things off. It constantly demands I update things, if I put a disk in the drive it insists on helping me open it. It wants to do things for me but 9 times out of 10 it's wrong about what I need to do so it's just a hassle. I have none of that trouble with Mac. If you enjoy fighting to get software to install properly and don't mind all the crashing stick with windows, you won't be happy with Mac. The lack of viruses and easy installation means all you are left with is using the software. I'd just love to see some more balanced reporting. Jobs may have been making fun of Microsoft but as some one that struggled for years with Windows there's a lot to make fun of. Fix the OS, stop the crashing before you worry about catching up to Mac feature wise. OSX had some growing pains, gee that never happened to Microsoft (cough) ME (cough). Now they have a rock solid powerful OS. Microsoft has a DLL house of cards.
First of all, copying is good. We would still be trying to make fire by randomly hitting stones against other stones if we weren't allowed to copy other people's innovations (which, by the way, is why I think Patents hinder progress rather than helping it). It's good that Apple's copying virtual desktops from Unixes. It's good that Microsoft is copying the trash can from Apple. It's good because:
So in general, there's nothing wrong with copying because it makes the ecosystem as a whole better.
Yet, all this being said, it is good to keep track of who is mostly innovating and who is mostly copying, and reward the innovators with your money. That way, you put the money where it will be used for further innovation. You reward the innovator. You accelerate the improvements already happening.
Last time I checked, service packs were more or less major security patch bundles, every release of OSX introduces new tools, refinements to the core OS itself and new technologies.
Sure they come often, but upgrade W2k from SP3 to SP4 (hell, upgrade W2k from original version to SP4) and you still have Windows 2k, nothing new under the sun, maybe your calculator's been updated if you're lucky.
Update OSX from 10.3 (Panther) to 10.4 (Tiger) and you're in for major changes, upgrade OSX from 10.1 to 10.4 and you've basically got a different OS. Which is why Ars manages to do 15+ pages full text reviews for each new iteration of OSX. There's just no way to do that with service packs.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Extra bonus points for mentioning that Microsoft sold the stock not long after the investment for a profit. The deal was entirely symbolic outside the pantent dispute resolution that you mentioned.
Also, the Office and IE applications were part of the same dispute. IE as the default browser, even, was also decided in this whole mess. It was a (I believe) 5 year agreement to keep supporting Office and other applications on the Mac platform which has since ended and been renewed in spirit by the Mac BU publicly at a previous WWDC. It is not often realized that Microsoft is one of Apple's closest, largest and most successful third-party developers, and both benefit greatly from the relationship. The light-hearted jabbing the Steve Jobs does makes it appear otherwise to those not entirely in-the-know.
Personally, I think that everyone with their head on straight knows at this point that copying is something that everyone does on this level. You may be one of the holdouts to think that this is bad, but if it was bad and nobody would do it, where would we be today? Just taking the Mother of All Demos, nobody except the by Engelbart designated innovators would be given access to the stuff presented there: the mouse ("Bug"), video conferencing, email, hypertext... When people are bitching about "copying" or "stealing", I don't think they consider the alternative and how much more crappy it is.
There's also a thing as overdoing it and not inventing enough on your own, but I don't think any major vendor (Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and so on) are doing that as of today. Apple's poking fun at Vista to rally the troops (it's a developer conference!) and to twiddle Microsoft's nose once more while they have the chance - it's marketing, not the universal truth.
I also think that 10.5 is misunderstood at this level. Take Time Machine: even if we discount the smoke-and-mirrors display of the thing or the fact that the OS helps you backup efficiently with a non-boot volume and four UI controls in its preference pane, the big innovation here is really that you can restore not only one file but that there are *built-in hooks* for "here's this old file and here's this new file" which means that you can cherry-pick old items from old database files. This is something very neat and very useful that in 99 cases of 100 couldn't be done before without resorting to poking and prodding the database files themselves; and now that it's built-in to some of Apple's apps, it's not only going to be tremendously useful there but there's going to be an onus on third-party developers to provide support for this, which means a better user experience for everyone.
As a developer, I'm very excited about 10.5. There's all sorts of new APIs, the old APIs have been extended in better ways, and the developer tools have reportedly gotten the biggest facelift since, well, *ever*. Xcode 3.0 may even trump the step from OS X's Project Builder to Xcode 1.0, and the Interface Builder has finally received some much-needed love. Gruber's right: "Complaining that the announcements at WWDC only appealed to 'the geeks' is like going to a rock concert and complaining that all they did was play loud music."
The thing that makes it complex is that Microsoft release new versions of Direct X and .NET out of sync with the operating system (and even IE when they can be bothered) - and to a degree these run on older versions of the OS.
With Apple it's the whole lot - end applications and programming APIs. I suspect this may start to change now that OS X is mature, and there is less need to generate cash from existing customers / more focus on new customers - i.e. we may see new APIs introduced in point releases at WWDC, rather than only with a major OS release.
'Capitalists of the world, unite! Oh
Microsoft got a get out of jail free card, plus a way to make a profit on their settlement.
Microsoft also got rights to keep Internet Explorer 5 as the Mac default browser (this was before Safari), and as wacky as it sounds, it was the best browser on the platform at that time.
Apple got to show a commitment from one of their largest developers that was rather long (5 year commitment for software). Plus they got to show off by having a company that is supposedly their #1 enemy say that the Mac platform was so great that they were willing to do all of those things.
This is one case were Steve's Reality Distortion Field worked in both Apple's and Microsoft's favor.
Shawn's Tech Articles
I doubt it. Apple's current model has one major advantage: Simplicity. You don't have to put a whole bunch of individual requirements for a piece of Mac software, all you have to do is say "Requires Mac OS 10.4 or later", and you have everything in the bag. One of the things that Steve and Apple are trying to stress is simplicity and eligance. It's probably the first bullet point in the creation of "The Apple Experience", which is, virtually, the thing that continues to keep them alive and well. It's in all their product lines, it's in their marketting, it's in the very definition of what Apple can offer you. It also gives developers a break. Instead of constantly having a new thing to learn (a new graphics architecture, new OS commands, etc.) the learning is all done at the same time in one big push, but then lets the developers sit back and... well... develop, for the rest of the OSs cycle. It's part of Apple's cyclical business model: There is a season for learning the new features of the OS (tis the season to be jolly), and there is a season for getting down to business. Don't expect that to change any time soon.
Oh, and it also makes the releases that they do do, much more substantial. Every time they release a new OS X version, it's almost as big a deal as Microsoft releasing a new OS, because they are able to introduce everything that they've come up with since the last OS version, where-as a lot of the core additions to Windows are updated throughout the particular OS version's lifetime.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.