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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."
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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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.
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.
Yeah, but at least Apple hired the original engineers :-)
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
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."