Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Responds To "Like OS X" Comment
Z80xxc! writes "After a comment by a Microsoft employee claiming in an interview that 'what we [Microsoft] have tried to do with Windows 7... is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics,' the Windows 7 team has issued an official rebuttal, saying that the comment came from an employee who was 'not involved in any aspect of designing Windows 7,' and that it was 'inaccurate and uninformed.'"
Random person thinks he knows everything, grows an ego and tells "juicy" stuff to press to boost that said ego while actually knowing nothing.
Nothing to see here. But I suspect lots of Linux/Mac OSX fanatics will be coming in 3.. 2.. 1..
Pretty sure on the list of 'Things not to do if you like your job', admitting you're inspired by the competition and complimenting their design TO THE PRESS has got to be in the top 3.
So a Microsoft employee says something out the top of his head. In a normal discussion between me and you, this would be just an opinion, something along the lines of "I think that...". But change the speaker and all of a sudden it's along the lines of "BIG SECRET REVEALED!!!1111" kind of thing. Even worse, for most people it becomes one with the company's official PoV and this simple statement grows so much that the company must spit out a rebuttal via an official channel/spokesman. :)
We are living in a twisted, perverted world, where one can't express an opinion without being beheaded by both the press and the company he's working for. God help us all!
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
and no longer has a job
Well, considering that I had no idea what that guy said until I read it here, I'd say MS is putting more fuel on the fire by saying that. Would it have ended up on slashdot even if MS hadn't issued the denial? Maybe, but by denying it, it ensured it ended up on slashdot. In any case, this guy has the title, "partner group manager" which sounds like not only is he a manager but, suspiciously, in marketing too. It is funny though that MS periodically has these guys go off the reservation and start spouting not tactful, but perhaps true comments.
But anyway, considering that Apple has put a huge amount of effort into streamlining their OS and making it more responsive to the user, just in general I think that's a good thing to emulate in your OS. For example, I can remember waiting on 10.0 and 10.1 for what seemed like eternities for the spinning beach ball to quit but that's gotten a lot better with recent releases. (Don't get me started on if you were trying to log onto an ftp server that wasn't responding.)
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
So Mac copied Xerox Star, and Windows Copied Mac? Do you know who copied whom for OS/2, Amegia Workbench, NeXT, Linux, BeOS, and GeoWorks; all of which have similar WIMP interfaces?
It would be silly to say that any (other than STAR) evolved in a vacuum; but "borrowing ideas" has happened in every direction.
One of the problems OS X has is that it lacks the ability to use these menus through the keyboard easily. In Windows I can hit the Alt key, and quickly see all the menus I can open by using an other key (the letter used for the menu item will have an underscore). Such as Alt + F is the file menu.
Each menu item then can be accessed usually through an access key. So Alt - F - S would be save. I know in both Windows and Mac OS X you have direct save short cuts too, and you can configure short cuts to common items, but that's not I want.
What I want is to be able to access a menu list from the keyboard quickly while exploring, not remember various different short cuts.
Apple has a lot of good ideas that Windows and Linux copy. Likewise, Windows and Linux generate a lot of good ideas that the other two copy. It's not surprising that Windows is mimicking some OSX features (and it obviously is). It would just be nice if Microsoft and Apple stopped getting patents on every damned thing (sudo) and acknowledged that other can have good ideas. Personally, I think Windows would do better to take pages from the KDE book, but maybe that's just personal taste.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
Windows 7 is still clunky, slow, and unstable.
Citation needed. I use Windows 7 and it's certainly not one of those.
This space for rent.
There'd be a lot more tech support calls to Apple if you could easily get rid of the top menu bar.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
The employee specifically said they copied the Mac's "look and feel" which is a determining factor for infringement lawsuits. So as far as lawyers are concerned, he basically said "We stole some of Apple's work."
They ain't trying to save face. They are trying to save a lawsuit loss (i.e., money).
So some clueless employee in a company of tens of thousands of employees made a comment on the record. If this was an employee on one of the design teams, and it was a comment in an email to their manager and said email leaked, there would be a story and a lawsuit. However it wasn't, it just happened to be conjecture by someone that pulled their comment out of their ass.
The employee should have known better to make such a comment to begin with and is likely now /very/ aware of Microsoft's press policy.
What the employee did was no different from a factory worker for Ford that spends their day driving new cars into the parking lot making a comment about the design inspiration for the F-150. To be frank, I'll be surprised if the employee doesn't get fired, they certainly have cause.
"We never used OS X as a source of inspiration in the design of Windows 7. This is completely uninformed. We used KDE 4 instead".
That's not far from the truth.
Or at least, if you tell people KDE4 is Windows 7, they believe it.
That was only a simplified example. Not a very good one (as everyone can remember Ctrl+S). But some applications on both platforms can potentially have a lot of shortcuts.
Which is a good thing, but not a replacement. There are some applications where the amount of shortcuts are massive. I don't want to remember them all. I don't want to have to configure applications all that much either. This means I have to do it on new machines too. Personalisation is handy, but I want something out of the box.
Which works for most applications, but not all. Word processing (like Word) and graphics (like Photoshop) often have many options. Most will be quickly accessible, but others won't be. I think the visual cues given from the Alt system is very handy, and allows jumping into applications much easier. The contextual switch is less of a burden. It might be a small thing, but it annoys me and probably other power-users who like relying on the keyboard (although, I could be alone on this).
If Microsoft hasn't been copying Macs the entire time they would be shipping 5-Star notebooks and Bic pens rebranded as MS office. Aqua vs Aero? I think the jab there is fairly obvious. Dashboard vs Sidebar? They are like the same damned thing, except Dashboard is less irritating. Apple makes iPod, MS rushes to make a Zune? I realize their products are very different under the hood, and how they behave, but on the surface MS spends quite a bit of time copying Apple to make "original and innovative" things for Windows. I haven't used Win 7 myself yet, but I have watched people show it off and the first thing I thought of in many of the new "shiney" is "Hey, Mac was doing that a year or two ago".
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
users. Let the users tell you what is good and bad. Build the interface to match the user.
The interesting thing here is that your evidence doesn't match the examples.
Microsoft puts every single thing they do in front of users, and tests it to death. Apple puts some really smart, good designers in a room and they do what they think is best. (overly simplified, but you get the idea)
One of the first things Jobs did when he came to Apple was to kill the UI research group. They have a unified, attractive and logical interface because they keep it tightly controled and don't let groups of just anyone come in and tell them to change things. They're also secretive to the point of paranoia, which means they'd never be able to do user testing groups before launch of anything.
Microsoft is bland because every single thing they do is tested over and over and over again with user groups, which gives them a lot of data, but means they end up with the lowest common denominator on everything.
You can make your own decision on which is better.
I actually read something that made the case that Microsoft was too consumer focussed. This is around the time when MS had just got the security religion and the person said that until then, nobody was asking for security in their focus groups and market research, just features and compatibility with older software. Geeks were asking for security, but they made up a relatively small number of people in the market. When worms,viri and root-kits and all that started being more and more prevelent, people started asking for security, and so MS started doing security.
Short version: Ask your users what they need all you want, but you're always going to be a reactive organization, and you're never going to surprise anyone, because they'll always just get what they ask for. If you make educated guesses what they need, you'll sometimes blow them away with something awesome.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
Oh man, the number of times I've heard one of the BD/marketing guys spouting off about some shit he has only been paid to sell, not understand and I've thought, man, seriously hope no one he is talking to has a clue, because, really, if they do, we are going to look like dicks right now.
This shit happens a hundred times a day all over the world, BD/marketing guys spout shit, what we pay them for, apparently, just happens this time someone wrote it down where people who know better could see.
Nothing MS specific about this, except this particular waste of space happens to work for them. Or at least, he did :)
"The first successful commercial GUI product was the Apple Macintosh, which was heavily inspired by PARC's work; Xerox was given Apple stock in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)#PARC_legacy
People don't realize this: Apple paid Xerox!!! That stupid, "I stole the TV first" thing is rubbish. Apple paid (in stock) for the GUI; Xerox didn't want it anyway. Apple brought it to market, raising the price of the stock Xerox owned.
As a person who spent years using a Star and the earlier Alto, I'd say that if you eliminate Xerox's ideas from the original Mac OS and Windows, there wouldn't be much left.
They may've used that as a defense, but it never got that far:
"Much later, in the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit in which Apple accused Microsoft of violating its copyright by appropriating the use of the "look and feel" of the Macintosh GUI, Xerox also sued Apple on the same grounds. The lawsuit was dismissed because Xerox had waited too long to file suit, and the statute of limitations had expired." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)#Adoption_by_Apple (same Wikipedia article)