Of course, the question in the article about what kind of party Apple will throw when it comes out with yet another OS that everyone but a superior Mac type will ignore is kind of funny - since it will be kind of difficult for Steve Jobs, the guy who is busy hiring criminal defense lawyers, to attend a launch party from prison.
They paid Xerox. "Stole" would not seem to be accurate.
Excuse me. Don't let facts get in the way of your rant. You are wrong.
Apple BOUGHT the rights to use the information and inspiration they received from two visits (a total of 16 hours) to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Station in 1978 by giving Xerox one million pre-IPO shares of Apple Computer common stock worth about $1,500,000. Xerox sold that stock for about $22,000,000 less than a year later after the IPO.
The first meeting involved just Steve Jobs and one other Apple representative. He returned about three weeks later with eight Apple engineers who were not allowed to see any code, just ask questions, see operations on demo machines and to play around with the User Interface, which is distinctly different from the Lisa or the Mac UI.
Some theft.
. . . since it will be kind of difficult for Steve Jobs, the guy who is busy hiring criminal defense lawyers, to attend a launch party from prison.
Guilty until proven innocent, Eh, KellyAdmirer?
Are you aware that Bill Gates ALSO received back-dated stock options from Microsoft? And, unlike, Steve Jobs, actually benefited from his options? How about the fact that Microsoft's accounting adjustments for the backdating totaled over $150,000,000 for three years of backdating compared to Apple's $84,000,000 for ten years??? How about the fact that over 200 companies practiced Back Dating of stock purchase options... which was and is legal so long as it is properly reported on the books?
"Then the nonsense about Microsoft stealing from Apple - when it was Apple that stole all its key ideas from Xerox in the first place."
Stuff and nonsense. The Mac project was being devloped concurrently with the Alto project at Xerox's PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, where they invented ethernet and the laser printer), and the people staffing both programs had done GUI research in college and regularly shared ideas previous to this. Apple's GUI paralled Xerox's efforts in many ways, but the major components of the Apple GUI was in place when the two demonstrations of the Xerox tech were done to sell the Mac to Jobs, who did'nt "get" the Mac yet.
Apple saw no code, there were major differences in the two GUIs, and Xerox lost their suit against Apple claiming they copied them. It was a proof of concept dog and pony show with a demo and Q&A session, that many, many other companies got.
Microsoft, however, had two prototype Macs and code so they could develop apps for it pre-release, and were working on Windows at the same time *in secret*. It was Jobs' own fault, for only requiring a verbal agreement from Gates not to copy them.