“Microsoft would be negligent if they didn’t consider what Apple is doing well that Microsoft isn’t, and frankly, the opposite is true as well.”
Very true. Most people don’t know, or choose to forget, that Jobs and Woz (the Apple founders) originally stole the GUI idea from Xerox Park. The fact that they make better machines than PC’s running Windows isn’t because they’re more original, they just have a better quality control system in place.
This has been posted at least a hundred times on FR and shot down at least a hundred times. Apple paid $100K for a four hour demonstration of the Xerox GUI. Xerox knew what they were doing when they gave the demo, and knew that Apple was making a computer with a GUI, and that this was the reason they wanted the Xerox demo. There was other compensation involved. Swordmaker has all the details, but Apple did not "steal" the GUI from Xerox.
Xerox let Apple’s people in. They were allowed to look at what they had developed. Apple in return, gave them x amount of pre-IPO shares of Apple Stock, which Xerox later sold for a tidy sum.. IIRC.
Sigh. The reason most people don't know that is that it simply is not true!
Apple did NOT steal the STAR interface for the UI from Xerox. Apple paid XEROX 1,000,000 shares of pre IPO APPLE Common stock (then worth $7 per share) for a mere 16 hours of visits to PARC and the rights to use what they learned there (they took no code, only ideas). Secondly, Apple's and Xerox's implementations of the User interfaces were very dissimilar... and Apple invented quite a bit of it independently including such things as the drop down menus, movable windows, the trashcan metaphor, drag-and-drop, and sub menus. These things are documented.
XEROX's suit was initiated by a new XEROX CEO who was not familiar with the 1978 visit to PARC and the terms of the agreement. The suit was tossed out of Court when Apple produced the written agreements that revealed that Apple had indeed paid for the rights and had not "lifted" anything from Xerox's PARC and were entitled to what they used. Xerox had sold the stock it received for the visit for about $16,000,000 shortly after Apple went public in 1980. The made about $1 million an hour for a show and tell dog and pony show.