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.'"
Then they did a terrible job copying OSX. Windows 7 is still clunky, slow, and unstable. It's nothing like OSX at all.
Microsoft wants things to be orthogonal, logical, menu driven, hierarchical, and otherwise fully featured. Apple takes the approach that the user doesn't want to fuss with all sorts of menus and submenus (no two button mouse for years!)
MS have dropped the menu approach (think Office) - but personally I prefer the menu approach. And Apple's OSs have had menus for years, anyway.
Apple applications still make use of two buttons, which you have to clumsily press a control key to access.
applications which do not necessarily have any UI themes in common with each other.
No, it's Apple who are the worst offenders here - just look at how Quicktime and Itunes on Windows completely fail to comply with the Windows UI standards.
In my experience, Quicktime and Itunes are the worst UIs I've encountered - anything but elegant. I have trouble finding out how to do simple tasks in Itunes (e.g., getting it to recognise updated mp3 ID tags). Only yesterday, I plugged someone's Ipod into my computer so we could watch something - only to find the software had renamed files into random garbage, distributed across randomly named folders in no apparent logical order. We had to guess via file sizes, and try every single one until we came across it. Apple, it Just Works!
And what does "elegant" even mean? What's your objective definition, and your evidence for this assertion?
As always, subjective assertions without evidence get modded up simply because they are pro-Apple, whilst I bet I - even though I give clear examples and evidence - will get modded down, simply because these facts do not fit with an Apple moderator's worldview (how does moderation work these days, anyway? I haven't had any for years, and it seems they're only given out to those who mod up pro-Apple posts these days...)
Microsoft is doing a lot to emulate Apple. And frankly, it's about time.
God, I hope not. And with "Macs" these days being Apple branded PCs, I'd say the reverse is true.
And in 2003:
And in 2005:
It is truly bizarre that average people allow the shills to make noise promoting such incompetence. Look at their search engine payment bug and you are reminded yet again what kind of people they must scrape the bottom of the barrel to get. Not just known-nothings, but fresh-out-of-school ones at that. Sadly that scam has gone on for a generation. What happens if they get into schools or colleges and start posing as staff or faculty??
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
You press Control-F2 and use the cursor keys to get to Some Option.
MS innovations have always been in Marketing themselves.
A lot of people applaud OS X for it's great interface, and these same people then bash MS for admitting that they let it influence their design!
It's pretty simple - implemented it first and brought it home. Microsoft copied it, and I don't think they added anything to it.
See, it has more to do with the fact that this is the latest instance of Microsoft implementing something that they didn't design, selling something that appears to be blatantly stolen, and claiming it as their own. DOS was bought from someone. Windows was taken from numerous someones. The Office suite was created as a response to Lotus, WordPerfect and others. And we all know how Microsoft has defended it's position in the marketplace (that whole anti-competitive thing).
Add that to the fact it took Microsoft almost 10 years to have their design "influenced." If Microsoft said, "Look, we missed the boat on this taskbar idea. It's a great design and we'll be implementing something similar." I think there would still be grumblings, but not with the same level of sarcasm.
As someone dealing with unencrypted file transfers from OS X I laugh at it being more secure. I'll grant in some ways it's better. For those of us that haven't been running as Administrative users and yes, that includes my grandma, we haven't been worrying about browsing the wrong site for many years now. The advantage for OS X is that it treats it's users like idiots and in reality that's probably a reasonable assumption. Fortunately there are ways to open it up but you're still left with an OS that sucks at playing with others. I'm referring to ever worsening Samba support making file transfers to both Linux and Windows servers absurdly slow, then of course there is the shaky NFS support which has only slightly improved with time. I'll never understand why Apple couldn't use the IPSec transfer abilities like Samba on Linux does. Instead it will just send your username/password and all your data over the pipe in the clear. Yes, real security!
It works?
brainwashed Apple zombie fanboi Nice ad hominem. But if you want to believe the FSF propaganda, go right ahead.
Why bother