Comment Amusing!....;) (Score 1) 533
Reading all of the "Microsoft copied this, copied that" posts, it stretches the imagination to discover that discerning between OS X and Vista seems pretty easy for you...so I imagine it's rather easy to tell the difference between the OS's after all, which probably doesn't bode well for the "copy" conspiracies. My favorite such conspiracy, though, tells of how Apple "copied" Microsoft's support for x86 cpus--not to mention ide, agp, pci, etc., ad infinitum..;)
Personally, I just don't understand the "copy" conspiracy lingo at all. It's not like Apple, after all, invented either the GUI or even the concept of the GUI. Those things clearly predate both Apple and Microsoft. Talking about a GUI is to me like talking about a wheel. All of the automobile manufacturers on earth employ the wheel as a foundational concept, and all of them do it in similar ways, but rationally no one ever thinks that "GM owns the wheel and it isn't fair that Toyota copied GM," etc. Such sentiment would be ridiculous, imo.
Such is the same in personal computerdom--exactly. The concepts that are foundational to the industry--and the GUI is merely one of them--belong to *nobody* and thus are never, ever "copied"--but merely shared. The difference is in the implementation of those concepts, and that's exactly where you can see the differences between what Microsoft and Apple are doing. I believe the differences are stark and very easy to see.
Personally, I just don't understand the "copy" conspiracy lingo at all. It's not like Apple, after all, invented either the GUI or even the concept of the GUI. Those things clearly predate both Apple and Microsoft. Talking about a GUI is to me like talking about a wheel. All of the automobile manufacturers on earth employ the wheel as a foundational concept, and all of them do it in similar ways, but rationally no one ever thinks that "GM owns the wheel and it isn't fair that Toyota copied GM," etc. Such sentiment would be ridiculous, imo.
Such is the same in personal computerdom--exactly. The concepts that are foundational to the industry--and the GUI is merely one of them--belong to *nobody* and thus are never, ever "copied"--but merely shared. The difference is in the implementation of those concepts, and that's exactly where you can see the differences between what Microsoft and Apple are doing. I believe the differences are stark and very easy to see.
