Microsoft is nowhere near as left-wing a company as Apple.
My original point: that Apple has never really come up with an original idea of its own -- its nonsensical claims to the contrary notwithstanding -- remains unchallenged in your post; in fact, you acknowledge it.
There are some similarities. Several of the command-line utilities are BSD. Of course, as with Apple, it is perfectly legal for Microsoft to do that.
As for look and feel and features, Microsoft is always aiming for the previous version of OS X.
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.
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.
Care to provide an example where MS less left-wing than Apple or Apple is more left-wing than MS?
“Microsoft hasn’t stolen anything”
LOL! Just yesterday MS pulled a Windows 7 installation tool from its website, because someone caught them using GPL code in it!
MS is the king of “innovating with other people’s ideas”. ;-)