Apple vs Microsoft- Who's the Copycat?

torrensmith writes "Paul Thurrott attacks the Apple Mac OS X Leopard Preview. He does have a few kind words for Apple and its leader Steve Jobs ("They do good work. It's too bad they feel the need to exaggerate so much.", but overall, he rips apart Apple for mimicking Vista, even going so far as to call the Apple fascination with Vista "childish." Paul does include a healthy review of the latest Leopard features, but quickly returned to his bashing of Apple. "

Bashing?

[Sarusa]

I didn't see any bashing in here. All his points are well taken as he swats Microsoft or Apple appropriately. They both steal whatever they think is best - the huge difference being that Apple can actually deliver something on a reasonable time schedule.

Of course if you're one of Steve's Commandos type of Mac owners I can see where this article is Pearl Harbor all over again, especially where he alludes to the RDF.

Re:Here We Go Again...

[truthsearch]

Ok, so which part of 'News for Nerds' does this come under?

from the does-it-really-matter dept.

(Really.)

Rebuttal

[mrchaotica]

Two of the new features--Time Machine and Spaces--are valuable additions to OS X and worth discussing, though both, interestingly, have been done before in other OSes.

...But not by Windows. Time Machine goes way beyond Windows' System Restore, and is more similar to VMS's versioning filesystem. Spaces is just virtual desktops, yes, but Windows never had them either [from Microsoft] except for a half-assed "PowerToy."

Apple was inspired by Vista features like Spotlight (er, sorry, Windows Search) when creating its previous OS X version, Tiger

Spotlight is not like Windows Search. Spotlight uses metadata much more extensively, and is actually more similar in concept to the database filesystem that BeOS had 10 years ago and that Microsoft has been trying (and failing) to implement since about the same time. So yes, Apple "copied" it -- but from BeOS, not Windows.

By that measure, Microsoft has improved Windows by a far greater degree. In the same time frame, it has shipped [14 "different" Windows versions]. Heck, I might be missing some versions. No, they're not all major releases (The N Editions? Eh.) But XP x64, like Tiger on Intel, was a major engineering effort.

In terms of actual new functionality, all those add up to less than the amount of new functionality Apple has added to Mac OS X in the same time frame. Yes, SP2 was major, Media Center was major, Tablet PC Edition was major, and I'll allow his assertion that x64 was major. But that's it. All those other editions only differed in which combination of preexisting features they included.

And Apple has nothing--absolutely nothing--like the Media Center and Tablet PC functionality that Microsoft has been refining now for several years.

False. Apple has Front Row, which has much less functionality than Media Center, but is certainly not "nothing like" it. And Apple has something like "Tablet PC functionality" too. It's called Inkwell [apple.com]. The only reason nobody knows about it is that, since Apple doesn't sell a Tablet Mac, you've got to have a Wacom tablet to use it.

"They've been trying to ship a single release that's had many names [it's had one name, Vista, and one codename: Longhorn. --Paul]

That's not true; they've been "trying" to ship the features that Vista was supposed to have since about 1995 (e.g. a metadata filesystem), and still haven't managed to do so. So really, they've used every codename from "Chicago" to "Blackcomb" to describe all the functionality that Vista is supposed to have.

He said that Microsoft was ripping off Spotlight with Windows Search in Vista, which in fact, had been developed and publicly discussed long before Spotlight ever saw the light. (To be clear, Apple borrowed that one from Microsoft, but implemented it much more quickly.)

As I said before, the idea originally came from BeOS. Aside from that, the shortcuts Apple took to make Spotlight (i.e. it isn't actually part of the filesystem) resemble the steps Microsoft took when going from WinFS to Windows Search.

And then the rest of the article consists of Paul listing the things that he admits Microsoft copied. I'll omit those since I have no argument with them.

Top Secret

[vitaflo]

The author may have wanted to pay attention to the part of the keynote where Steve says there are many things they would not show about Leopard because they didn't want MS to copy them (complete with a "Top Secret" slide). To assume these are the only new features of Leopard is rather foolish. Why would Steve show his hand early if he doesn't have to? Apple has been burned enough by MS the way it is.

If he's going to compare features, wait until we get the full story of what's in Leopard.

Re:Well, take from both!

[outZider]

Nope. A third party created a QuickTime plugin that plays Windows Media files better than the Mac player. They just released an Intel version of this plugin.

Microsoft has released nothing to date that is a Universal Binary. They are currently promising a universal version of Messenger 6.0 later this year, and a free universal version of Remote Desktop Client. There isn't a date set on the next version of Office. Virtual PC and Windows Media Player for Mac have been cancelled.

Re:Well, take from both!

[bano]

WMP for mac is nomore.
You might be referring to Flip4mac the quicktime plugin that Microsnot says you should use to replace WMP.

Re:Everybody is the copycat

[93 Escort Wagon]

"... viewing all virtual desktops in miniature versions the way Spaces does might even be new, at least I haven't seen it before."

Enlightenment's pager has provided a "live screen(s) snapshot" for a long, long time. Also, the old Gnome pager did the same thing (back when Sawmill/Sawfish was the default window manager) - but, as with some other Gnome eye candy, at some point they decided to get rid of it and make do with the rather clunky pager they have now.

On OS X I'm currently using VirtueDesktops, since Desktop Manager has stagnated pretty badly - but I'm looking forward to an Apple-developed integerated system.

Re:Everybody is the copycat

[NSIM]

> Expose and viewing all virtual desktops in miniature versions the way Spaces does might even be new, at > least I haven't seen it before. That's stollen from old Xerox LISP environment's "ROOMS" so nothing new in Apple stealing XEROX (who of course invented the photocopier, how ironic!)

So what, Paul?

[lewp]

That's a shame, because I'm actually a huge fan of both Apple and Mac OS X. I just want Leopard to be better--much better--than the OS that Steve Jobs and company described this week

So what does he want? Apple seems to have pretty much everything Microsoft was planning to ship (and probably some of the stuff they ended up dropping) with Vista covered. He's long on criticism for Apple's mountains-out-of-molehills marketing, which is completely valid, but he doesn't say what they're missing at all.

He explains right off why Apple has to be grandiose about their software. They're trying to get attention for their computer business. They're trying to increase that tiny sliver of market share they have, and if they just hop up on stage and say "Hey guys, we got a couple new features in here. Hope you buy our computers," nobody's going to go for it.

Microsoft can afford to be more reserved and dismissive of Apple and their other competitors. They're the 800lb gorilla. Even admitting Apple exists is probably more than they'd like, because more people will hear that than all the Apple shouting from the rooftops in the world.

features that didn't make the keynote

[moosesocks]

First off, Jobs publically stated that there is a bunch of stuff that's still under wraps. This may very well be because it's not done, or because it's of no significance to developers, and doesn't need to be announced in advance. Imagine all the bad press Microsoft could have avoided by never announcing WinFS until they were *positive* that it would be done in time for Longhorn?

With that out of the way, a bunch of other "less exciting" features [aeroxp.org] were announced, albeit not in the keynote.

A few highlights:

• Leopard will be resolution-independent -- This is a HUGE feature that the world has needed for the past 10 or so years. We can finially move twoard HD displays without having to squint our eyes because the text on a 4000x3000 monitor would be microscopic.
• Carbon apps can now embed Cocoa components. Might breathe some more life into the old legacy apps, as well as making Photoshop and Office a little more tolerable, and a little more mac-like.
• Apache 2.0, Ruby on Rails and Subversion are included in the end-user version as well as the server, which I think speaks for itself. How cool is that?
• Complete support for 64-bit applications across the OS. Last time I used it, there were some (very noticiable) lingering 32-bit remnants in XP-64 that made it virtually unusable.
• All sorts of new APIs that should allow every application take advantage of the cool new features announced in the keynote, as well as extensions to some older APIs (iCal specifically) -- anyone who's used the .Mac Backup application can attest to the wide range of software that builds in support for it.

Re:Well, take from both!

[pyros]

Microsoft has released nothing to date that is a Universal Binary

Intellitype and Intellipoint 6.0 [microsoft.com]

Re:System Restore != Time Machine

[masklinn]

No. Volume Shadow Copy is a backup utility, it's not file-grained (it works at the volume level, even though you can restore individual files), it's hand-triggered (Time Machine will more than likely be automatic, just as VMS' filesystem was in 1975), and it only allows you to create 512 images.

Time Machine is either a copy of VMS' versioning filesystem, or a copy of 20 years old Source Version Control tools retrofit to the job by removing features useless to regular end-users (commit messages, blames, ...) as it works on a per-file basis, saves full history and doesn't require user action to create new versions.

Wakey Wakey!

[littleghoti]

Instructions for booting OSX in the command line here. [oreillynet.com]

Re:Here We Go Again...

[Golias]

Right-clicking for contextual menus was around as an additional software feature (sometimes even included with mouse driver software) long before it was part of any OS, but Microsoft added it as a built-in feature of Windows95 long before Apple jumped on the bandwagon.

Granted, if it was also a feature of NeXT, then Apple probably would have carried it over to OS X regardless of what MS was up to, since OS X is really just the newest version of NeXT with a few MacOS features bolted on, but the fact remains that Apple was late to the party on this particular feature.

Re:Well, take from both!

[doh123]

Microsoft found it cheaper to pay Flip4Mac to allow free downloads of the plugin. MS makes sure that the Flip4Mac item is a free download, but they do nothing to develop it directly. It existed before MS started linking to it

Re:Well, take from both!

[cberman]

Microsoft actually has discontinued development of the Windows Media Player (if that's the program you mean). The last version (WMP 9) was released for OS X in 2003. Microsoft has also discontinued development of Internet Explorer for the Mac (last version was v5) and Virtual PC now that Parallels has beaten them to the punch. What you might be referring to is Flip4Mac, which recently released a Universal binary of their Quicktime plugin that allows windows media to be played in OS X (although not always well).

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/otherpr oducts.aspx?pid=windowsmedia [microsoft.com]

Psst! Time to wake up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Mac OS X can boot to the command line, and yes it can be administered from there.

• Cmd-S at boot to go into single user mode
• Down-Arrow, Option-Enter, ">console" to get a console login from the gui
• Modify /etc/ttys and/or /etc/rc to completely disable the gui

Get with the times, man. Did you fall into a coma in the 1990s?

Paul doesn't understand the new features

[XMLsucks]

New things are hard for most people to grasp, and so they don't see the innovation. Innovators have to spend a lot of time trying to demonstrate their innovation. In this matter, Apple has hardly done a good job explaining the innovations; they seem to have expected everyone else to look at the announcements and to put them into context. Obviously that hasn't happened, and everyone is saying that Apple made meager announcements, with nothing cool. Paul is one of the blind people, and most of Slashdot is blind too. Paul says that Time Machine was already implemented by Windows. That is balloney. Earlier, the Slashdot crowd claimed that Time Machine reimplements VMS's file system. That is balloney. Time Machine is too innovative for you guys to see why it is awesome, so here is my attempt at explaining it, to make it clear that innovation is hard to spot: http://slashdot.org/~XMLsucks/journal/141549 [slashdot.org]

Re:Smashing Apples

[the_rev_matt]

I think that's accurate. Based on my circle of friends (online and off), I think I'm a pretty standard Mac user. I paid for the Jaguar upgrade, got the Panther upgrade for free when I bought a new computer, and paid for the Tiger upgrade. And that still is less than one license for the minimal usable version of XP (Pro = $300).

Re:One more rebuttal on Mail.app

[jkabbe]

Knock yourself out:

http://harnly.net/software/letterbox/ [harnly.net]

(note: I am not affiliated with this site or software in any way)

Re:Innovation isn't the same as invention

[GiMP]

The dock originates from NeXT, which predates Windows 95. My understanding is that the Finder/OS support files the way they have always supported them, but in OSX added some additional ways from NeXT (.app folders, for example), and yes, a little bit of file extension support (ala Windows). However, supporting file extensions isn't an issue of copying invention or innovation, it is a matter of compatability. For instance, without a file extension, how easy is it for the operating system to determine what application should open a specific XML document? Without using file extensions or filesystem metadata (which wouldn't exist if the file was made on a non-mac system), this could be quite difficult.

Re:Wakey Wakey!

[ixl]

Lights out management will be an available feature on the new Intel XServes. This was announced in the keynote.

Re:Agreed

[SanityInAnarchy]

Well, take something that came with the computer -- after installing XP from scratch, I DO have to search the web to get a decent video driver. A fresh OS X install on my Powerbook, and I already have one.

Trouble is, how do you know what hardware will "just work" for Windows? Most of it just doesn't, until you pop in the driver CD or download something off the web.

In any case, let me tell you a story. I once boycotted Pepsi, because I couldn't stand the Pepsi girl. One too many "duh"s, and I decided that was it, my caffinated beverage of choice would be Coke. Plus, I had once had a Diet Pepsi, and it was disgusting.

Now that I'm more mature, I did actually try Pepsi, and since it's all going to be the same price and the same amount anyway, I'll take Pepsi over Coke any day. It's usually sweeter, usually has more flavor, the Coke is just sharp and often salty.

I am very, very hard on computers, and I've made my Linux crash a few times, my Windows a few more, and my Mac maybe once or twice. My parents' laptops (running XP Pro) don't sleep or hibernate properly (although they CAN hibernate), and they were purchased more recently than my Powerbook, which sleeps like a baby, and gets rebooted maybe every couple months. I do miss the ability to hibernate, but not much, as the Sleep is so well executed that it can actually sleep for about a solid 2-3 days before it needs to be charged.

But even if you're going to be that petty about the Mac ads, everyone I show them to laughs their ass off, whether it's true or not. You identify with the Mac, which is actually far more civil to the PC than I've seen any PC user be. They're some of the few ads that people actually want to go download and watch for themselves -- most ads you want to skip through and avoid. I'd call that a success.

Re:Innovation isn't the same as invention

[NMerriam]

The miserable Dock is functionally very much like the WIndows 95 taskbar, the Finder and OS now handle file extensions about the same way Windows does, and so forth.

eh, you do realize that the Dock was built in NeXTSTEP in the 1980s, at the same time Windows 3.0 was being developed? Suggesting that it copied or was "moving towards" the windows taskbar half a decade before the taskbar existed is just silly. Especially since it behaves totally differently, being based on the principle that the user shouldn't have to care if an application is running. The windows taskbar was strictly a task switcher, although they bolted on the quick launch bar soon afterwards and have added support for application-specific context menu functionality to the task switcher. If anything, the taskbar has become much more like the dock over the years.

Similarly, filename extensions were inherited from the NeXTSTEP system, though I suspect you don't know much about how file types are handled in Mac OS if you think it handles extensions the same way Windows does. It has several layers of file typing, some based on unix methods (magic numbers), some based on the Mac OS legacy resource forks, and others that use straight extension mapping. The classic Mac OS also supported file extensions, they just weren't the preferred method of identification -- but as networks became more common in the 90s and other systems kept stripping the resource forks from files, extension mapping became more commonly used.

Regardless, it's not as if MS had anything to do with developing file extension behavior, they directly copied the function and behavior of CP/M, which copied from other systems going back several decades before Microsoft even existed.

Re:Innovation isn't the same as invention

[dr.badass]

The miserable Dock is functionally very much like the WIndows 95 taskbar

In what way?

the Finder and OS now handle file extensions about the same way Windows does

This isn't even remotely true. Windows depends on file extensions almost exclusively. Mac OS only uses them in the absence of a Uniform Type Identifier, Type/Creator codes, or MIME type.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Mocking?

[MojoStan]

Thurrott just hates when Apple points out the 100% truth that Microsoft has cloned a lot of Apple-isms. Where does he think the search field in the upper-right of every Explorer window with the magnifying glass came from?

The magnifying glass came from "Find" in Windows 95 [guidebookgallery.org] (also in Win95's Start Menu [guidebookgallery.org]), "Search" in Windows 2000 [guidebookgallery.org], and "Search" in Windows XP [guidebookgallery.org].

The search field in the upper-right of Vista Explorer windows might have been adopted from Windows Address Book, which has had a search field in that general area since Windows 98 [guidebookgallery.org]. OS X probably adopted it from iTunes.

Hell, where does he think the Recycle Bin came from?

From Xerox Star (1981) [guidebookgallery.org], where it was called the "Wastebasket." I know, Apple copied Xerox first. But the Wastebasket/Trash/Recycle Bin is not an "Apple-ism," it's a Xerox-ism.

Or the new system tray icons that are blatant clones of OS X's?

Can you be more specific? Which icons? Are the "blatant clones" not obvious choices for what they represent (like a magnifying glass for "Search")? Who had a "tray" first?

I'm sure Microsoft has "cloned" a lot of Apple features. However, many people incorrectly give Apple credit for things cloned from other companies (e.g. desktop metaphor).

Other things "Vista" should copy

[jackjeff]

I sure hope Microsoft will copy the idea of "non-modal" "sizable" floating windows when it comes to the next version of office, or visual studio (sure i haven't tested the latest beta.. maybe it's there...) And whoever that comes from, whether they copied it or not.. i don't care, because it's real annoying, especially when you have a list with only 4 visible items and the windows size is about one tenth of the space available on your screen, and you just can't make it bigger because some smart ass decided it's not resizable!!!

Speaking of which, the awful "customize" toolbar window is one of them (first thing I use in a windows software to get read of the 4 toolbars with 80+ buttons i won't ever use.... and make my own with the only useful buttons). That thing in visual studio/office is HORRIBLE. So if Vista could add an API to do it cleanly like in OS X or XUL/Firefox, i'd be happy.

Drag and drop. Even before Macos X, Macos had a much more decent support of it... and this might be because of the underlaying APIs... Hope Vista will fix it.

And the last one, I want a "usable" spacial file manager... even gnome has a decent one now! Windows XP has only a limited support for it, which was not improved much from Win95, and in fact it is so annoying that I simply disable it and end up like all windows user, having that Giant explorer windows with my directories on the right...

===

Now here's my list to Apple for leopard.

Make this fucking kernel run faster! Ok the 64 support bit is great (copied from M$ :) ), but that pseudo micro kernel architecture which is not really one anymore and just adds 36 layers and different approach to kernel programming 1) does not really simplify the job of kernel developpers 2) performances are sluggish. Apple did a great job in Tiger by removing one funnel, and I was kind of hoping that after Tavenian left Apple, we would have a brand new kernel "mostly compatible" with what was there before... but much faster. I want a more "monolithic" apple/bsd and the mach ipc system (can't be removed and it's good).

Second, i would like some kind of virtualization manager included in the OS/kernel... I remember connectix made apple add some features in MacOS X for their virtual PC (vmm API), which disappeared on x86. It was ok, wonder why Apple threw it away... I guess the VMWare and Parrallel folks will have "each" to write their own hooks in a kext.. and make their own stuff... I would like an OS integration feature with a GUI level for "virtualized" machines and all that built-in in leopard, even if there is no apple virtualized machines.

JFS support.

NTFS writing support.

Security, I want a sandbox environment that I can trigger and watch for every application I use. Something that's builtin in safari 3, but i would rather have a Finder option "lauch in secure environement". That thing should write logs of what the application is doing and so on... and this option should be used by default to open any e-mail attachment / safari downloads... And all the bad guys that gave interest to Apple lately would be even more disgustted by the cost of writing crippleware for Mac, and would return to their well loved platform... Microsoft. And Apple could still say in their ads "no virus" on mac.