Microsoft manager admits to copying 'Mac look and feel'

tuaw ^

[Gomez]

We've been saying it for years, but everyone thought that we Mac-heads had a chip on our shoulder from the once-sour relationship with Microsoft. Finally, however, the truth has come to light; a group manager from Microsoft has gone on record and admitted the source of some of Windows 7's prettier bits and pieces.

Simon Aldous sat down with PCR for an interview and when he was asked to comment on the agility of Redmond's latest operating system, he had this to say:

"What we've tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it's traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel."

While I am glad that people at Microsoft are finally accepting the superiority of OS X, it still stung a little when Simon started to backtrack saying that Vista was more stable than OS X.

Update: It looks like the Windows team had a few things to say about Simon's earlier remarks noting that "his comments were inaccurate and uninformed." It is, in my opinion, difficult to deny that the OS X dock has had a positive impact on how people use their computers whether they be PCs or Macs. That being said, I'm glad Microsoft didn't take this one lying down.

[Boucheau]

Well, to listen to the Mac fanboys, the Mac was delivered from on-high. Why wouldn’t we model all computers after the Mac?

And why are the Mac fagboys upset about this? Can’t they claim victory now? Or does this thpoil their fun?

Those who have been around this industry for a while know that this is nothing new.

[dayglored]

> Mac fagboys

Stuff it, if you don't mind. FR threads don't need that crap from you or anyone else.

> Those who have been around this industry for a while know that this is nothing new.

And pray tell, just how long you been around this industry, old timer?

BTW, I know you're a troll, from other threads. But I've got 5 minutes, I'll throw you a cookie...

[antiRepublicrat]

My original point: that Apple has never really come up with an original idea of its own

BTW, few ideas overall are completely original. You can almost always find some origin. For example, Englebart invented the mouse, not PARC. The WWW is just a larger version of Hypercard, written by Apple. But Hypercard is basically a high-speed, computerized Rolodex. The first digital music player was made in the 70s, and the first on sale was from Korea in the late 90s. Microsoft's MS-DOS was a copy of CP/M for x86 chips, but CP/M itself was influenced by TOPS-10.

But it is true, Apple quite often isn't the first to do something. Apple's main claim to fame is in being the first to do something right.

There's a decent list of things that sucked before Apple decided to try it.

[Swordmaker]

This is Apple's standard claim, and like most of the things claimed by Apple supporters, it's nonsense.

Male Bovine Exrement, Fred. What you are spouting is the nonsense.

Apple gave Xerox an equity stake in the company in exchange for some -- but not all -- of the GUI interface they stole. They most certainly would not have made such an offer to Xerox if they already had any defensible prior art on the drawing board. Even the libtard weenies at Apple aren't stoopid enough to offer to pay money for an idea they already have.

Both the Apple and Xerox PARC GUI developments were based on Evans' and Sutherlands' Stanford Artificial Intelligence Projects... and actually take separate pathways toward the same end.

Apple started the Lisa project in early 1978. Intended from the beginning to be a GUI type use interface, Apple was working in earnest on development of the GUI, hiring people who had worked at Stanford on GUIs.

The visit to PARC did not occur until December 1979, over a year into the project. PARC is the Palo Alto Research Center... founded with the express purpose of developing new ideas for use in the computer industry. Apple was already working on a GUI before visiting PARC at the suggestion of the ex-PARC employee who had been spearheading some of the GUI work at PARC and later at Apple.

Larry Tesler, one of the demonstrators for the Apple - PARC visit, was so impressed with what the Apple people were doing and what they described they had already developed, that he quit PARC and went to work at Apple as the new director of the Apple Lisa project.

Apple gave 1,000,000 shares of PRE-IPO stock in Apple for two 8 hour visits to PARC and the rights to use anything they learned while on the visits. The IPO share price was $22. Xerox sold their million shares shortly after the IPO and took a huge profit.

Apple took only observed demonstrations and took no code away with them. Apple's engineers only got ideas to add to their own work. Many of the developments in the GUI are Apple's own development and are so patented.

The actual GUI of the products that Xerox released, the Xerox Star (1981), differed significantly from Apple's GUI on the Lisa (1983) and later on the Macintosh (1984).

Apple is theft central. The GUI is Xerox's. What is OS X? BSD. What is the iPod Touch/iPhone interface they've (erroneously) been awarded a patent for? Stuff stolen from Palm OS.

More BS.

The GUI story is above.

Apple is a fully licensed to use the portions of BSD UNIX they use. It properly licensed and is not "stolen."

AS for your assertion that Palm OS is somehow the base for Apple's iPhone touch interface, you are woefully ill informed. Are you aware of the Apple Newton PDA?

First Apple Newton PDA (an acronym for Personal Digital Assistant, coined by Apple CEO John Sculley, January 7, 1992) released August 1993.

First Palm Pilot, March 1996:

Apple was first out of the blocks with a touch sensitive PDA system by 3 years. IIRC, Palm licenses some of the Newton patents from Apple.

Liberate yourself. Don't use or develop software for Commie outfits like Apple. And jailbreak your iPhone, just to annoy the little fascists.

Your grasp of economic theories is a flawed as your grasp of the history of computers and the iPhone... which is it? Communist or Fascist?

. . . brain-dead folks who support Apple lap-up their party line.

Those who resort to ad hominem attacks do so because they lack facts to back up their argument.

[uncommonsense]

And don't forget, Jobs and Wozniak started their work together building black boxes in their garage to rip off Ma Bell by enabling free long distance calls.

From Jobs biography:

In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak. He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India.

Jobs then traveled to India with a Reed College friend (and, later, the first Apple employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlightenment. He came back a Buddhist with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing. During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, calling his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life." He has stated that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking.

He returned to his previous job at Atari and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered US$100 for each chip that was reduced in the machine. Jobs had little interest or knowledge in circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them $600 (instead of the actual $5000) and that Wozniak's share was thus $300.

Jobs has a long history of stealing the work of others, taking the credit, while claiming to travel on a "higher plain" than the rest of the common folk.

[dayglored]

> Windows internals have no similarities to OS X.

You really ought to study a bit more about the history of various operating system developments, before you make uninformed statements like that.

The internals of OS-X are largely BSD Unix. Modified, yes; and coated with a slick GUI; but by and large, BSD Unix, legally licensed.

The internals of Windows are largely the Win-NT codebase developed by Dave Cutler of DEC in the early 90's, are heavily modeled on DEC VAX/VMS, and like VMS, Win-NT borrowed many internal ideas from Unix. You may also recall that Microsoft was originally a Unix outfit prior to them buying MS-DOS, and the system calls of all their operating systems have incorporated large amounts of Unix system-level functionality and compatibility.

I'm not saying Windows internals are mostly Unix, the way OS-X internals are (Windows would be greatly improved by that, IMO). Just saying, there's more commonality than you let on to.

[politicket]

All I know is that when I call a conference meeting of my employees through GoToMeeting, it is always the Mac people that have the problems connecting in.

Go figure...

[dayglored]

It appears that tonight, like Lenore of Many Moons, we suffer from a surfeit of raspberry trolls.

No, wait, Lenore suffered from tarts, not trolls. Well, who knows, perhaps our trolls are tarts also.

Whatever... I'm off to sleep, they're not interesting enough tonight to warrant any more of my attention. Good night!

[Swordmaker]

And don't forget, Jobs and Wozniak started their work together building black boxes in their garage to rip off Ma Bell by enabling free long distance calls.

Yes, they did, and for the rest of your cut and paste from Wickipedia, apparently, yes, he did. So what?

Thomas Edison cheated Nicola Tesla out of $50,000 back when that was real money and Edison was a fully mature adult. Bill Gates sold IBM an operating system he did not own at the time of the sale—and did not disclose much more important information than the details of the "breakout" deal—to the guy he bought it from to get it.

People are flawed... except for you, who must be perfect to be so judgemental.

The statute of limitations on the Jobs/Wozniak blue boxes is long over, as are the potentials for picayune drug crimes of the early 70s, Woz has long since and multiple times forgiven Jobs for the so-called theft of the money for "Breakout." Incidentally, Jobs brokered the "Breakout" deal with Atari... and contracted with Jobs to do the design which he agreed to do for the specified $300. Without Jobs, Woz wouldn't have gotten within a statute mile of that deal. Was it ethical? I wouldn't have done it to a friend. Was it legal? I don't know. But Woz agreed to the $300 and was happy until someone outed the deal later. . . but by that time Woz was a multimillionaire dozens of times over, because of the efforts of Steve Jobs who knew how to capitalize on Woz's ideas... something Woz was totally incapable of.

In his adult life, after he grew up, Jobs has successfully remade three major economic markets making hundreds of millions of dollars for Woz, and Billions of dollars for people who have seen fit to trust his acumen, judgement, and abilities and invested in his companies and projects.

Those who throw such brickbats as you did in this thread, do so, I think, because of jealousy and envy.

[dayglored]

> All I know is that when I call a conference meeting of my employees through GoToMeeting, it is always the Mac people that have the problems connecting in. Go figure...

Silly boy, that's easy to figure.

As a heavy user of GTM on both Windows and OS-X for many years, I'll tell you that Citrix' support of the Mac was weak, late, and incomplete.

(Say, that couldn't be because Citrix has been in bed with Microsoft for years for RDC, could it? Nah, mere rumor...)

Nevertheless, the GTM audio quality on a Mac the last year is consistently better than on a Win-PC. There is one nagging visual artifact on the Mac that I bitch to Citrix about regularly. Other than that, both work fine.

[uncommonsense]

"The internals of Windows are largely the Win-NT codebase developed by Dave Cutler of DEC in the early 90's, are heavily modeled on DEC VAX/VMS, and like VMS, Win-NT borrowed many internal ideas from Unix."

Actually dayglored, you're forgetting the little tie-up between Microsoft and IBM working on OS/2 before Microsoft had learned enough about multi-threaded, multitasking, multi-user OS principles from the masters at the time - IBM - then split off to develop NT. Then they hired Dave and somehow kept their shirt after IBM let them off the hook for pulling out of the joint venture (IBM still believed they could rule the PC OS market at the time since they made a good penny on it the first time and were sorry they let Microsoft get their foot in the door).

[Swordmaker]

Whatever... I'm off to sleep, they're not interesting enough tonight to warrant any more of my attention. Good night!

and they're too easy to refute... g'nite.

[abigkahuna]

...Mac fagboys?

Come on, you are calling this 53 year old married man using a mac, a fag boy? Jeez. A little touchy aren't you? You know, the first and only computer I have ever purchased is the mac I am using now. A macbook purchased in Sept of 2006. Prior to that I had that internet tv system. Now I have never needed a computer in my line of work. But three years ago, I realized that I needed a computer to make a website, a dvd and other graphics for our micro business.

I researched the available tools. Quite frankly, the macbook fit the bill. It did what I wanted it to do right out of the box with no extra software.

Using the machine was intuitive. Within the first day I completed two short videos of our business for the web, crafted a website and performed other jobs. All this without ever knowing how to use a computer. Intuitive.

Some folks were raised with a silver keyboard in their mouth...

[dayglored]

> Actually dayglored, you're forgetting the little tie-up between Microsoft and IBM working on OS/2 ...

Point granted, I didn't mention it. Had IBM not stubbornly insisted on using the fatally flawed 286 16-bit protected model, Microsoft might not have bailed and hired Cutler. But Cutler was uninterested in the IBM technology -- he wanted to use the opportunity at Microsoft to build his next iteration of VMS. (Yes, that's a gross simplification.)

Anyway, I was talking more about the internal operating system concepts and code, than the business/tech deals.

[ROTB]

All I know is that when I call a conference meeting of my employees through GoToMeeting, it is always the Mac people that have the problems connecting in.
Go figure...

*****************

There was a long discussion on useNet long ago about whether Mac or Atari ST users were more clueless.

Finally, someone settled the matter by saying: [The Atari ST user base is 1/100 the size of the Mac user base, and EVEN THEY managed to scrape together the clue to do a port of gcc.]

Those days are over. Clue-less and clue-ful people use Macs.

[dayglored]

You needn't pay much heed to Boucheau's comments. He's a troll (very consistent and evident on many past threads), of the "seagull" variety: flies in, flaps furiously, squawks a bunch of incoherent nonsense, craps on everything and everybody, and eventually flies away. It's occasionally entertaining, in the same way that a dog with diarrhea running circles in the living room can be entertaining, but mostly a PITA. Certainly you needn't feel compelled to explain yourself to him.

I'm heading out now. G'night!

[politicket]

Nevertheless, the GTM audio quality on a Mac the last year is consistently better than on a Win-PC.

Not my experience at all. In fact, I just had one of my employees cry to me about not having a USB headset since that's the only type of headset his Macbook Pro would take. Apparently it doesn't have any audio inputs.

I told him to spend some of his hard earned money on whatever he needs to get the job done, and stop crying.

Typical Mac. Emotion over substance.

[uncommonsense]

You're rather snarky tonight.

OK, there's a lot I don't like about Steve Jobs the man, the myth, and Apple's gastapo-like control of anything they package and sell. I'm not that impressed with their products from a price-to-practical-benefit perspective. The Next machine, when Jobs was driving the innovation bus all by himself (without Wozniak, who you seem to completely dismiss as someone unable to make a buck without his zen master Jobs), was an utter disaster. At least the Next hardware was a disaster - using an optical drive for operational storage vs a standard "winchester-type" HDD? One step up from paper tape. Yikes!.

Yes, some of Apple's Human Factor Engineering tricks are cool, but I don't credit that solely to Jobs. He's learned to hire good talent and then get out of the way. But for instance, I find a Blackberry Curve more functional for what I need then an iPhone by quite a long shot. The Blackberry is lighter, cheeper, and open.

[Swordmaker]

You're rather snarky tonight.

Just factual.

Yes, some of Apple's Human Factor Engineering tricks are cool, but I don't credit that solely to Jobs. He's learned to hire good talent and then get out of the way. But for instance, I find a Blackberry Curve more functional for what I need then an iPhone by quite a long shot. The Blackberry is lighter, cheeper, and open.

Fine. Use it. But, when did you use an iPhone long enough to learn how well it works or doesn't work?

[uncommonsense]

" In his adult life, after he grew up, Jobs has successfully remade three major economic markets making hundreds of millions of dollars for Woz, and Billions of dollars for people who have seen fit to trust his acumen, judgement, and abilities and invested in his companies and projects"

And Jobs / Apple owes their current solvency and existence to Microsoft's $150 million cash infusion in 1997. This was on the heals of Jobs being fired from Apple for mismanaging it's product strategy, then starting and tanking Next Computer in 1996 - based on the culmination of everything he knew at the time. So, no, Steve Jobs doesn't walk on water as you seem to believe.

Just factual.