Is OS X Leopard a copy of Windows Vista? Mari-Jo Foley, of former Microsoft-watch fame, seems to think so.

She sat through Steve Jobs' WWDC presentation last week and noticed that:

"if you’ve seen Vista, there’s no way you could help but compare the feature-complete Leopard beta Jobs showcased with Windows Vista. And — surprise — Vista looked pretty darn up-to-date in comparison."

To a Mac fan crowd that applauds an update to the calculator application (yes, they have done that), claiming that OS X is copying features from Microsoft is poring gas on the their Mac loyalist fires.

18 Jun 2007

Microsoft hasn't invented many of the features in Windows Vista, and neither has Apple with OS X.

Apple's Time Machine backup and recovery technology appears to be powered by Sun Microsystems' ZFS (although Apple has yet to confirm that this is the case). If true, Apple can merely take credit for bringing it to the consumer space. But nobody will give Apple (or Microsoft) credit for inventing backup and recovery technology.

The idea of creating a platform for tiny applications too was by no means an Apple (Dashboard) or a Microsoft (Sidebar) innovation. In fact, do you really want to take credit for inventing the ability to run applications that provide the users with information?

Does folding two functionalities into a single application and passing it off as an innovation warrant bragging? It can be useful to have your RSS reader and browser in the same place. But neither Microsoft nor Apple demonstrated any leadership in inventing the browser or RSS in the first place.

Apple and Microsoft are both in the business of slapping a user interface onto technology – most of which was invented elsewhere. They then squash the competition by bundling those user interfaces with their operating system (just ask Netscape if it is possible to compete with an application that is bundled free of charge).

If you want to take credit for anything, take credit for making somebody else's invention easier to use. That too is an argument that you will never win, but at least it gets us away from the "invented here first" nonsense and elevates us to "copied here first" level.