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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.
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.
Well, if we're going to be pedantic: Thurrott's "point" was that Apple shipped features that Microsoft had previously announced but not shipped. The implication apparently being that Apple needed zero planning time for their features and can clone Microsoft features out of thin air faster than Microsoft can implement them.
In other words, it was classic Microsoft "our vapour tomorrow will be better than their shipping product today" FUD from the Internet's #1 Microsoft toady.
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