Apple vs Microsoft- Who's the Copycat? 683
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. "
The true copycat.. (Score:2, Interesting)
There, would that make him happy? Honestly, it's been said time and time again that the best features of one OS tend to bleed over into others, whether it involves the GUI, networking, or filesystems. Honestly, Apple only makes "photocopier" comments to differentiate themselves in the market from Windows. But I guess logic like that, marketing or otherwise, doesn't generate the page hits required.
XP64 (Score:2, Interesting)
The one major thing I have a problem with is him touting XP64.
XP 64bit is the hugest piece of shit know to man.
Thats why it costs less than 32bit XP.
Little to no drivers for it, seperate paths for 32 and 64 executables, ontop of it just being buggy beta code level of stability.
It's worse quality wise than WindowsME.
Ok Thurrott, if that is your real name! (Score:1, Interesting)
Microsoft has improved Windows by a far greater degree. In the same time frame, it has shipped Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional Edition, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (and 2005 UR2), Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, Windows XP Home and Professional N Editions, Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2, absolutely a big Windows upgrade), Windows XP Embedded, Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs, and Windows XP Starter Edition in various languages. 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.
Ok, all of these are simply the same OS with different feature sets. Ok, so fine, the x86_64 was a "major engineering effort" (ya right). So lets count that as two major releases since 2001. Isn't that about on par with Apple's MacOS X? The initial releases (MacOS X.0, Windows XP), and then the major platform changes (MaxOS X86, Windows XP 64).
Time Machine is a truly good idea: It helps you automatically back up everything on your system and restore earlier versions of files at any time. But this was a great idea over three years ago when Microsoft first added it to Windows Server 2003 as Volume Shadow Copy (VSC, or "Previous Versions" to end users). In fact, VSC is such a good idea, Microsoft is adding it as a purely client-side service in Windows Vista as well.
You're right. It's a great idea. In fact, the innovative way they've implemented it makes it even better. Oh, whats that? Windows' interface to the same "feature" sucks? Thats right. Frankly the version in Windows 2003 Server is absolute crap.
Apple is integrating applications like Boot Camp, Photo Booth, and Front Row into Leopard. Previously, these applications were only available with new Macs, or in the case of Boot Camp, as a free public beta download. Sorry, but this is hardly impressive.
Its not the integration thats cool here, but instead the enhancements. Boot Camp is coming out of beta, Photo Booth has some awesome new effects/features, and Front Row has a lot of bugfixes and enhancements as well. Nobody once said "Hey look its being integrated," but instead said "Hey look, shiny (new features)!"
Apple's version of Windows Search will now search other Mac clients and workgroup servers, functionality that Microsoft will add to Windows Vista with the release of Vista SP1 and Longhorn Server in late 2007. It will also support advanced search features, like better search syntax, just like Windows Search. And, as with Windows Vista, you'll be able to launch applications and find recent items with Spotlight. Gee, Spotlight still seems an awful lot like Windows Search.
Thats right, a feature thats coming sooner, is being copied from software that will have it later. MacOS X had this tech before Microsoft even announced it in Vista, and really the new features are just a natural evolution of the technology.
You can find more of my response in my blog @ http://apple.krillrblog.com/ [krillrblog.com] at about 1PM PDT (20h00 UTC).
Actually a good article (Score:1, Interesting)
They were probably intended to. (Score:5, Interesting)
The features shown at WWDC were generally features developers want, and hints at the technology under them:
(I'm not saying all the features shown appeal only to developers, of course, just that Jobs and crew knew their audience. Many of these features appeal to other groups, too: iChat, Time Machine and Mail clearly appeal to other computer professionals who spend their job working on a Mac. WebClip will appeal to even casual users.)
Virtual Desktops (Score:3, Interesting)
Another truly major new feature, Spaces lets you utilize multiple desktops, each of which can contain its own set of application. Multiple desktops have been around for decades, and even the earliest Linux versions had this feature. Microsoft even implemented it in NT-based versions of Windows, though the company curiously never made it easy to access this functionality until it shipped a free PowerToy for Windows, called Virtual Desktop Manager, in 2001. It works an awful lot like Spaces, frankly, though Apple's version is obviously more polished and, well, Apple-like.
Well obviously this guy is either so biased he can't help it or he has a really terrible picture of what virtual desktops actually are. I tried Virtual Desktop Manager and it's bloody awful, I honestly can't think of enough bad words to say about it. That is the difference between OSX and other OSs IME, the Apple stuff just works. Microsoft stuff especially you have to screw around with for 10 minutes first.
Re:XP64 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well, take from both! (Score:3, Interesting)
Internet Explorer
Outlook
Project
Visual Fox Pro
Maintining them for the Macintosh, well, that's another issue
Wait a minute... (Score:2, Interesting)
Back in the early 80's, Apple was almost solely responsible for popularizing the home PC, if not inventing it, with the Apple II's, LISA's, etc. Microsoft responded with Windows 1.0, 2.0, and the popular 3.0 & 3.1, which weren't much more than a DOS shell that looked almost exactly like Apple's first GUIs, which came a couple years earlier. And Apple actually made their own machines. Steve Jobs had a lot to do with this, especially in the mid-80's when he merged his NeXT project with Apple. Ever since the beginning, Apple has been ahead of Microsoft (as far as I'm concerned) in every aspect, except perhaps with their hold on the market, and that's paritally because Apple chooses to spend their money and resources on R&D instead of marketing tactics.
Nowadays, it's getting harder not to copy each other, as well as other companies & OS's, because the seemingly main goal is to make it look "prettier" than the others. Reliability and functionality are already rather attainable (except with the remaining bugs in Vista...oops) so the focus now becomes what the consumer will consider more when shopping for a new PC.
Stable? Sure. Can I do what I want with it? More. But this one looks prettier!
Re:More to come (Score:2, Interesting)
Tiger on Intel (Score:2, Interesting)
The 210 days was for the switch for the entire product line to Intel processors. Jobs NEVER said it took 210 days to port OS X to Intel, he had admitted previously they had OS X running on Intel for a few releases already.
Re:Agreed (Score:2, Interesting)
In the end, the joke ended up being on Mac OS: 31 characters for a file name was fine for a while, but many common MP3 file names went way beyond that, causing problems as late as Mac OS 9.
Re:System Restore != Time Machine (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple Lisa had file versioning (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup, VMS had autoversioning of files way back when, but it was the Apple Lisa(tm) that had a GUI based file versioning system. When you created a document, an icon was created that looked like a page. When you editted the document, pages where added to the icon that looked stacked. You could easily go back to any prevision version. (This may have been copied from the Xerox Star system out of PARC that Apple copied.)
Re:Mocking? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that all Jobs was trying to accomplish with the demo was to give developers an idea of leopard's power and show them what kinds of things it can do. He showed developers how the address book tied into time machine to give them an example of the kinds of things timemachine can do. He also did it to show them how they could take advantage of it in their own applications. Once he did the demo of the addressbook, he included a few new features in mail to go along with it. With Core Animation, all he wanted to do was show developers what kinds of things it could do. Finally, the whole point of the iChat demo was to show developers what kinds of things leopard is capable of.
People are thinking too hard about the leopard demo. The demo was only supposed to be a display of a few of the technologies that are in it. We still know nothing about what leopard is and what it isn't.
Re:Who Cares About Copying Useful Features? (Score:5, Interesting)
No he doesn't. And as far as I'm aware, he never has in the past, either.
I realize that Gates-bashing and Microsoft-bashing are popular pastimes here at Slashdot, but maybe we could limit our attacks to things that they have actually done or said?
Re:"OK, Paul" (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:They were probably intended to. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure it'll be a huge help to developers themselves. But the Apple site states they're exposing an API. So it probably can be integrated with source control to some extent.
A good idea and a good implementation (Score:3, Interesting)
I saw the preview video of time machine and yeah maybe the interface is a little hokey, but the basic idea of it and how they interface with it is borderline brilliant. No longer does somebody even have to think in terms of backups, they just go into time machine and get the old copy. It's just simple.
This is what Apple has always been good at. They don't necessarily invent the wheel, but they sure make a wheel that's easy to use and has nice rims. The stuff just works. The reviewer clearly doesn't get the appeal of it because feature for feature it isn't that different. But how it does what it does is really what makes it distinctive.
Re:Everybody is the copycat (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Here We Go Again... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Agreed (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a fine line, but Apple is so far over that line it's not even funny. Whether you call them elitists, fan-boys, or "the Mac Faithful", it all boils down to Apple catering to a group of people who's default position is that everything Apple and all apple users are awesome while everything launched out of Microsoft and all microsoft users couldn't possibly be as good.
Apple itself has not always taken this elitist position. Didn't Jobs take a $150 million investment from Microsoft and put IE on all Macs for years? However, their recent ads have been designed to make PC users look like bafoons while Apple users bask in, really, an entirely different plane of computer use. I can't think of a more classic definition of elitism.
Answer me this, when in the modern Mac era has apple ever showed it's computers being used by buisnessmen in ties or blue-collar types playing games with their kids? I'm not saying that not being a "company of the people" automatically makes them elitist, but really it doesn't help. Macs are featured as being used by people smarter, hipper and better looking than you or me (well, me anyway). These people are elite. If Apple ever want's to be considered anything but elitist, they can start by showing ads of a receptionist using a Mac. Or is that just too... common?
TW
ZFS (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:world wide DEVELOPERS conference (Score:3, Interesting)
Relax. Take a deep breath. ...And another one. There. Do you feel better now?
I was just pointing out that Paul seems to think any time Jobs speaks, the only people listening have to be consumers. He seemed utterly confused as to why Apple would show technologies/features that primarily affect developers.
Of course, if Jobs gave speeches like the other Steve at that other company, Paul would've known it was a developers conference... "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!!!!!!one!!!eleventy!"
Re:surprised (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft, on the other hand, likes to make grand announcements long before the announced product is even in production. They want to be sure and build up anticipation so that later, when they cut a few features here and there, people will still have heard so much about the forthcoming product that they'll already have it stuck in their heads as something they need. Sure, they're vocal about what Vista "will be like," but that keeps changing.
The real question is whether this marketing strategy will continue to hold up now that Apple is making bigger and bigger headline with every surprise Steve pulls out of his magic turtleneck. Which means that his pokes at MS get more and more coverage as well.
Re:Agreed (Score:3, Interesting)
No, wait, I do care what they use and I'm going to travel 10 miles through the snow uphill both ways just to get my hands on a solution that they DON'T use so nobody will mistake me for a businessman.
Yeah, I'm that sick of businesses.
Re:Spotlight metadata (Score:3, Interesting)
By far the most useful for me is lyric searching. I have used pearLyrics to add the lyrics for most of my music collection into my iTunes library. I can search through all these lyrics using Spotlight to rapidly find out, for example, songs that use the word 'walk', 'swim' or 'avocado' - or even the ones that talk about swimming and avocados. This is really useful when choosing the right piece of music to use as a soundtrack for my home movies.
But its also useful for tracking down particular phrases that you aren't sure which document they are in.
The thing that makes it particularly pleasing to use is its speed. It is real time. It will be completed by the time I finish typing the query in. Windows search is just a nightmare - I just give up because I can't wait for it to finish.
But, hey, if you know the lyrics to every song ever written and everything you have ever created - more power to you. You should go on one of those TV shows they have for people like you.
Re:Who does it better? (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, pretty much everyone "knows" the Apple got a lot of GUI ideas from Xerox. What is probably less understood is how much the original Apple engineers did (I am including people who they hired from Xerox) to improve on the basic ideas they saw. There are a lot of things we take for granted, which the Apple people had to come up with (even basic things like a reliable way to have working overlapping windows, which Xerox didn't really have working).
That's my only problem with the "Oh, but Apple ripped off the GUI from Xerox" defense of Microsoft. There is a significant difference between how Apple and Microsoft approached things. When the Apple guys went to see the stuff at Xerox, it inspired them and they took what they saw and then used it as the basis for a lot of original ideas and enhancements to what had come before. On the other, Bill Gates' big obsession with the Windows guys during its initial development was just to make Windows "work like the Mac". That is, Gates didn't seem to really be pushing his guys to come up with new GUI ideas, etc. or push things forward. He wanted to just replicate the Mac.
That really strikes me as the fundamental difference between Xerox and Apple and Microsoft. Xerox PARC was doing some amazing stuff, but Xerox didn't seem to know what to do with it or have much interest in really bringing it to the masses. Apple was inspired by the Xerox PARC work (Smalltalk in particular), and took it and used it as the foundation to develop a really mainstream GUI concept for the masses. But Microsoft was focused more just on crushing the competition and coming up with a decent enough replica of the existing GUIs.
So, that's my problem with using "But Apple stole it from Xerox" as a defense. It basically makes it sound like there was this single monolithic "GUI" concept that was developed at Xerox, stolen and implemented exactly by Apple, and in turn stolen and implemented by Microsoft. And this just isn't true.
Re:Innovation isn't the same as invention (Score:1, Interesting)
Err, actually, no. The dock and the handling of extensions were adopted from NeXTStep / OpenStep which pre-dates '95 by at least 5 years. My take on Win95 was that it was "upside-down backwards OpenStep".
Re:Mocking? (Score:5, Interesting)
Best-informed? The guy once argued with me that Spotlight was inferior search technology because it used plugins to read third-party document formats. I kindly pointed out that Microsoft's search tech uses the same damn thing, called IFilters, because search tech isn't psychic and has to know how to read things. He never replied. It was at that moment that I realized he's not a developer and doesn't understand things from that perspective. He's more of a Dvorak. You mention CoreData or CoreAnimation, and it's in one ear and out the other.
Reasonable time schedule? (Score:2, Interesting)
Let me begin by saying that I love Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Let me also add that I hate/deplore Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. See the problem is that all three main players have made such incredibly large systems that you have to love at least some features and you have to hate some features as well. For example, I love the stability of Windows and Linux. I even think OS X is extremely stable, but the applications for OS X are typically incredibly unreliable and unlike on Windows or Linux where you can use another application for the same thing, Mac probably doesn't have an alternative application.
Linux release schedules have to be ignored since there's really no such thing as a release in Linux, it's more of a compilition of a bunch of stuff that's been released inbetween the previous disc and the new disc.
Let's look at what consititutes and OS X release....
- Applications (that are typically also downloadable separately for previous version such as iTunes, iMovie, etc...) are upgraded and designed to work a little better together
- Unix subsystem features that Apple should have held back the OS before releasing have now been included (so in otherwords, they held them back for the next release or whatever)
- Compiler tools have been upgraded.
- They fixed some performance issues with the Windowing system by implementing hardware hooks to offload processing the the GPU instead of CPU
- They charge you $129 to upgrade to the latest version of address book since the older version is now no longer developed or supported
- They charge you $129 for iSync support for your new telephone instead of releasing a module to support it on the previous version (this is why I upgrdaded to Tiger)
Microsoft released Windows XP, which included APIs for all the third parties to write pretty much anything they wanted to write. The rest of the OS is running strong to this day and I don't see any reason to upgrade to Vista before they make it impossible not to.
So far as I can tell, Microsoft has put a great deal of focus into moving the entire graphical architecture to run on the 3d GPU subsystem on Windows. This is cool, yes Apple did it first, but it's not an issue of copying, people have talked about this for years, it was just logical progression. So, yeh, it was time for Microsoft to do it now that pretty much every machine shipping has at least a half way decent GPU.
Here's a big reason why Apple does it first... they want to brag that they have released a new OS every year for 6 years. As far as I can tell, Microsoft just waited 5 years to include all the features in a $129 upgrade where Apple charges $129 every year for the same feature set.
Does Apple or Microsoft do it better? Who knows, I use both operating systems every single day since I'm in the video business and frankly, the PCs are typically more reliable and require far less reboots than the Macs. The biggest reason for this is Final Cut Pro which is an obscene memory hog, it's the first application running on a UNIX that I've seen that leaves memory all falling to pieces even after being exited.
The keynote picked on Microsoft over the Windows registry. Probably the most useful OS feature ever... in fact it netinfo on Mac would be just as useful if Apple did in fact get developers to use it instead of bashing Windows registry. Instead, I have piles of crap all over my Mac in hundreds of different places and uninstalling applications is damn near impossible, reinstall is the real way to fix a Mac.
So, does Microsoft have a reasonable schedule? I can't say, I tend to find that by the time Microsoft releases a new operating system
- Their compiler tools are all up to date and easy to use
- They have do
Re:"OK, Paul" (Score:2, Interesting)
When you put it that way it makes more sense.
My feeling about the progress of Apple's OS X is that it has been developed and incrementally-updated countless times since initial release, and I was looking at a 'narrower' definition of 'finished.' When the 'point-5' iteration is released, people like me, who have bought each of the 5 'versions of X, will have spent over $500 US, not counting the 'free' 10.0 beta that was gotten as a result of buying an Apple box (a Titanium 667, in my case) when OS X was on the verge of initial release.
For someone who might have used OS 9, back in the day, and then drifted away, and came back to "Tiger" on a Mini, or whatever, it looks pretty radical and like a helluva monetary deal. And, as usual, those of us who faithfully upgraded, all down the line, pay through the nose, and get the benefit of donating our time and efforts to bug eradication, bumpy installs, a couple of OS 'recalls' and re-releases, etc. It has not always been smooth. I haven't seen smooth video in the iTunes screensaver/music vid thing, since 10.2.8, for example. And I hear that in an effort to avoid starting internal fires (semi-laugh) they decided to down-clock the Graphics processor in the MacTel books. It's a minor gripe, but, it feels like a work-in-progress, to me, just my personal opinion/experience.
But I'm 'locked-in' just like all other longtime Mac users, and that's the deal. What kills me is that ubuntu can be upgraded, radically, and it just reboots sub-systems (as far as I can tell) without even so much as a restart involved after the upgrades. If Apple hadn't messed with the schizo NeXT/Legacy hybrid, it would do the same thing. (and actually will, in some cases, if one reads the full info on incremental upgrades, and uses the CLI to reboot affected subsystems), but I digress.
On another front, I agree with the folks who were asking, "What do you people want?" In that, Leopard looks very very interesting, and the new desktops are exciting, no question about it. I'm in. Still, er, again... heheh.