Microsoft Bites Apple, Apple Bites Back 1024
hype7 writes "The NYT (free reg reqd etc) is running an interesting article on where MS seems to be getting all the ideas for its next big OS release, Longhorn. It's only a quickie, but they look at MS's big news from WinHEC, and their possible sources for inspiration. They also pull out that fantastic Bill Gates quote: 'The one thing Apple's providing now is leadership in colors'; and that Apple execs are now having a laugh of their own over how Longhorn, 'Microsoft's 2005 version of its Windows operating system, apes features that have been in Apple's OS X operating system since 2001.'"
google loves you (Score:5, Informative)
Wish i was an editor
Use the partner link, Luke. (Score:1, Informative)
Microsoft "talks" to Apple (Score:5, Informative)
The good news is that Apple is not going for it.
Re:And... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Has either company (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly, you'd think the Internet would have spread information to the four corners of the Earth, but all it does it perpetuate the myths.
Where's the beef (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Flattery and Imitation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Flattery and Imitation (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not Surprising... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Flattery and Imitation (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, this has to be THE worst interpretation of facts I have ever seen in my life. It is SO far from the truth it's not even funny.
August 6, 1997, Microsoft agreed to purchase $150 million in non-voting Apple preferred stock. This wasn't anywhere close to 25%. Note that it was NON-VOTING stock - so essentially it was just a goodwill investment in Apple. Microsoft was required to hold the stock for at least 3 years before selling. Another clause of this investment was that Microsoft was to continue to produce Macintosh products, including all new versions of the Microsoft Office product.
Microsoft has since sold all of this stock - at a nice profit, I might add. Additionally, the agreement that required Microsoft to continue to develop Macintosh products has since expired as well.
I could have just modded this down - but I thought that attempting to correct this ridiculous interpretation of events would be more beneficial.
Re:Flattery and Imitation (Score:5, Informative)
Or, at least heavily in need of editing.
What really happened is this:
Microsoft bought $150M in non-voting stock at a rather good price, and promised to continue Mac software development (in specific, the development of their Office suite and Internet Explorer WWW browser).
Apple, in turn, agreed to bundle IE as the default browser on all OS installation disks, license rights to several of its software products, and support Microsoft's forays into Java virtual machine development.
The agreement was to last five years, and has since expired. Microsoft made money off the deal, considering the value of Apple stock when it sold it off. Additionally, Apple didn't really need the $150M infusion, as it had billions in cash reserves. A additional reason that MS might have made this move, was that the DoJ investigation into anti-competitive practices might have been countered by actions like this -- Redmond was essentially supporting a competing OS.
So, no, Microsoft never "bought 25% of the shares of apple" [sic], nor does it/did it really have any say in Apple policy.
Re:Why aren't we seeing UI innovation in Linux? (Score:4, Informative)
I think you'll find there's a lot of big ideas coming through, both in the back- and front-ends of GUI design.
Take KDE, for example, and its KIOSlave system, which is slowly moving KDE from being a collection of applications to a collection of pluggable components, with things like Konqueror becoming complicated wrappers for these components. The whole desktop is totally integrated - that's big, isn't it?
Or Enlightenment, whish is going even further to do away with the whole application concept altogether, or so I've heard (I don't use it).
And even little projects are doing interesting things, like Slicker, experimenting with how we manage our desktop space.
All these calls are ill-founded, and probaly stem from the fact that it is easy to keep up to date on Microsoft's and Apple's big moves, since you only get the occasional big article, whilst developments in the Free Software world come thick and fast.
Correct me if I'm wrong but, (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The both copy each other... (Score:1, Informative)
Wrong. iTunes will be out for Windows later this year.
won't play if you want to let a friend listen to a copy.
Wrong. You can have the file installed on up to three computers at the same time, and can freely move it from one to the other. This is only an issue if you want more than three "friends" to listen, in different locations, at the same time.
If your hard drive dies, you can't re-download it.
Wrong.
You're batting
I don't like DRM either, particularly, but how about some INFORMED criticism?
Re:Correct me if I'm wrong but, (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Correct me if I'm wrong but, (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The both copy each other... (Score:3, Informative)
THAT's the different between Apple DRM and MS DRM.
Actually Microsoft's DRM does allow you to burn to CD. Or transfer to portable players. The difference is Microsoft provides content owners with the ability to toggle these features. Don't blame Microsoft if record labels won't turn the flag on. EMI's new service, for example, is supposed to allow CD burning.
Re:Hey...Microsoft is catching up (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Apple leadership? (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed. But CEO's sometime make up a large part of a company's image and culture. Steve Jobs is no exception. He did just that. He changed Apple from the inside out. They are not the same company they were in 96.
I think Steve Jobs is a brilliant marketer and innovator. Something Apple was desperate for when he took over.
He really did save Apple. Apple became stagnat for years and the lack of a good OS was one of them. It was Steve who got the nextstepOS ported, created the imac, drafted a new modern UI(aqua), integrated bluetooth on all macs, came up with the itunes music store, etc.
During the early and mid 80's the macs were years ahead of the pc's. Built in sound, ethernet, a modern gui, and color layouts created the huge cult mac following. They were close to 10 years ahead of Windows based pc's. Again I believe this was part of Steve Jobs vision. Apple became stagnent after they fired him quite quickly.
The only thing Apple is behind on is hardware which oddly was its strenght when he wasn't the CEO. This is mostly Motorolla's fault but it has hurt them quite hard.
Apple had no leadership and horrendous marketing in the mid 90's. But today its the opposite.
Who else would pay premium prices for
What a change a good CEO can do. Apple went through 4 CEO's when they originally canned him.
Re:Apple leadership? (Score:5, Informative)
BTW, I can read a Word'95 doc into Office 97, Office 2000, and Office XP. It's really a non-issue
Yes and no - MS has put in a lot of work (although in the grand scheme of things it may not mean all that much since they have so many resources to throw at any problem) in maintaining forward compatibility for apps etc. (e.g. when Win95 was first released I was reading about how they had specific code to modify behaviour (i.e. reimplement bugs
But let's not forget how when Word97 came out the
We may be facing this with the next "XML document format" MS Word on the way...
Re:Flattery and Imitation (Score:3, Informative)
No. At one time they owned 5% or so of non-voting stock, but they sold it years ago.
I think the jist of the article was that MSFT pulled Apple out of a financial pinch or something.
That was the 1997 deal between Apple and Microsoft, where MS agreed to purchase Apple stock and continue producing Office for 5 years (note that this is now expired, and MS occasionally makes noise about discontinuing Mac Office). Rumor has it that this was the public portion of a settlement made after Apple discovered substantial patent and/or copyright infringment by MS in Windows.
Re:Oh, wow (Score:4, Informative)
You should get out more.
Here's [sitepoint.com] one of several short summaries available on the web covering the development and history of the GUI.
Re:Flattery and Imitation (Score:3, Informative)
and speaking as a next user (and cube owner) the features of OS X are from mac and the guys they brought from NeXT. if you really wanna know, the NeXT interface is the WindowMaker desktop manager.
Re:MS did this with Apple before (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Flattery and Imitation (Score:3, Informative)
The NeXT interface is a lot more than WindowMaker. WindowMaker only emulates the way window decorations and window management was done by *Step. I suppose WM's Prefs app also attempts to look and feel like the Step Prefs app. There are a lot of parts of what I think were definately part of the essential NeXT interface that WM doesn't touch.
Yes but who had 802.11 first? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Don't Laugh (Score:3, Informative)
To get graphics advantages in OSX, you have to port your OS9 apps over. To get the advantages in Longhorn, you don't have to do anything - all older programs get the accelerated graphics performance / window scaling / high DPI rendering without having to do a thing.
That is worth a lot more to me as a software company than having the feature out first.
Re:Fact or Fiction (Score:1, Informative)
There are lots of terrible white reporters who work for big papers. Therefore, your premise, "If you're white, you actually have to be a decent reporter to get hired by a big paper" is flawed. Affirmative action may be flawed, but the reason you give does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.
I think I understand the gist of your argument, which is evidently that meaasures of "objective" criteria of white hires under affirmative action exceed those of black hires. This is, perhaps, the most fundamental problem with affirmative action. While it may be useful and necessary, it calls into question the achievements of blacks who may not need affirmative action at all.
Affirmative action works, ideally, at the margins. In a black/white race system (as opposed to "comprehensive" or sex or economically-based systems of affirmative action), a few whites at the margins of acceptance are displaced by a few blacks at the margins. The political spin put on this by the code-word racists is that blacks are displacing well-qualified whites, when in fact they are displacing marginally qualified whites.
FWIW, in reality (which is more of a "comprehensive" affirmative action system -- which resulted from legislative log rolling resulting from the need to overcome white male resistance to affirmative action) most affirmative action benefits have actually gone to white women. Black affirmative action proponents have long viewed this as a deal with the devil, as the political power to compel a system of affirmative action on white men exists only if white women benefit from it. It is something of a bargain with the devil. The real threat to affirmative action is actually coming from the continued convergence of economic power between white men and white women.
Once white men and women are within shouting distance of each other economically, affirmative action will die. If you are a republican and you want to end affirmative action, the best thing you can do is to subsidize the hell out of day care.
Re:Has either company (Score:2, Informative)
what are you talking about? (Score:5, Informative)
Exacly what features of the Nextstep does win95 offer? "windowblinds"? Sure, if you download a serious modification. 95 shipped with the clumsy three button junk from win3.1 plus an extra button and a pannel. A root menue anywhere on the screen? Nope. The way it resizes windows? Nope. Menues that you can leave up on the screen? Nope. Can you name one feature that is not simply part of any GUI? I'm not going to go into the tremendous difference in the unerlying systems but just look at the apearances alone.
Nextstep was made from MacOS and was better. Windoze never did much more than follow along the GUI path, never evolving much from the first one they made. The evolution and lines of influence are clear when you look at screen shots from each.
For those of you not familiar with Next [osdata.com], check out this 1993 screen shot [w3.org] of the first web browser. [w3.org] The client was developed in 1990. There are many free implementations of the Nextstep such as Window Maker today. It still kicks any GUI Microsoft has ever made. After using a reasonable window manager on X, few people can go back to the M$ GUI confines.
For those of you fortunate enough to have missed Windoze 3.1, here is a little screen shot [osdata.com] from 1993 or so when Netscape became one of the first available browsers for Windoze. 95 added the X button on the top right, so I suppose you could say it coppied Nextstep in one way. Here is a typical Win95/98 desktop [min.net]. Windoze XP (screen shot to compare [microsoft.com]), is more of the same [min.net] and annoying as all hell.
Please don't compare reasonable software, such as Nextstep or Sun's Common Desktop Environemnt, to junk from Microsoft. People might get the idea that one was better than it is or that the other sucks in ways it never did.
Re:Apple leadership? (Score:3, Informative)
If WordPerfect could do it, why couldn't Microsoft? A WordPerfect document is nothing more than an SGML document. Create a document in WordPerfect 2002, save it, open it in WordPerfect 6, 7, 8, 2000, or 2002. You don't lose all that much formatting info, and you don't lose any of the content.
After using WordPerfect since version 7, I am appalled at the lack of consitency in Word. Why the hell can't they make a .doc format that is compatible across versions??
Afterall, XML is nothing more than a subset/extension of SGML ... why has it taken them so long to take advantage of it?? And why won't it work back to Word 95?? Somebody made a big mistake a long time ago, and they won't be fixing it anytime soon. Afterall, if they don't change the file format, what incentive is there to upgrade??
Re:Did anybody notice the photo (of the MS/HP Athe (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That Won't Stop Microsoft from Winning (Score:2, Informative)
There are a few reasons why OS/2 hasn't taken the lead in OSes. One reason is that OS/2 used a lot RAM that was very expensive that time. The people chose what was cheaper.
Oh and just FYI: OS/2 was a combined effort from IBM and Microsoft (up to OS/2 1.3 I believe).
Re:Sometimes this works (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Apple leadership? (Score:2, Informative)
Besides WP 8 crashed so many times, that I'd rather spent my time converting Word 97 to Word 95 documents (if ever needed).
Re:MS did this with Apple before (Score:3, Informative)
Xerox came out with the GUI. Apple and Microsoft both started working on a GUI. Apple asked Microsoft to support MacOS (by releasing apps such as Word and Microplan for the Mac). Microsoft agreed, but required Apple to sign an agreement that Apple not sue MS over Windows. Apple signed the agreement. Later, Apple sued MS over Windows.
In the suit, Apple claimed that Windows infringed on a nebulous concept called "look and feel". The judge threw out all "look and feel" claims, and would only consider specific claims. Then the judge went down the list, throwing out any claim that was covered by the agreement. About a dozen claims were left. Then the judge went down the list, and threw out any claim that Apple didn't own (common GUI things that anyone could do without Apple's permission). Exactly zero claims were now left, and the judge dismissed Apple's suit.
Short version: Apple agreed not to sue, sued anyway, and the judge ruled that the agreement was perfectly valid and threw out the suit. Seems fair to me.
And, by the way, we would not now have either GNOME or KDE had Apple won that suit. Apple winning that suit would mean Apple owns GUI desktops, and that would be Very Bad Indeed. Forget free desktops for Linux. Even forget non-free desktops for Linux; Apple would insist you buy an Apple computer running an Apple OS if you wanted a GUI desktop. (And any Apple fans who want to claim otherwise: how many licenses has Apple sold to the TrueType patents?)
steveha
Re:Help please (Score:3, Informative)
Re:what are you talking about? (Score:4, Informative)
...and...
Please don't compare reasonable software, such as
link [molgen.mpg.de]
Re:5 huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Apple demanded $1.2 billion from Microsoft for alleged patent infringements...
The negotiations that resulted led to a strategic agreement between the two companies in August 1997, one part of which called for Microsoft to invest $150 million in Apple and for Apple to install Microsoft's Internet Explorer as the default Web browser for its customers... As part of his videotaped deposition, however, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates testified repeatedly that his primary goal was to resolve the patent issues with Apple and obtain a patent cross license.
Re:Flattery and Imitation (Score:4, Informative)
Jef Raskin never worked for Xerox. Horn I don't know about.
Apple never copied Xerox' work. Raskin started the Macintosh project at Apple drawing on years of experience with user interface design. when Raskin had some of Apple's staff visit Xerox too see how they were doing, the Macintosh project was already well on its way. The original Mac had ideas licensed from Xerox, but it was by no means built on Xerox' ideas alone
Microsoft never stole anything from Apple. Apple licenced its technology to Microsoft, but through a glitch in the contract, Microsoft was allowed to do much more than Apple in fact intended
See Jef Raskins website [sourceforge.net] and Jim Carlton's book [barnesandnoble.com] (be warned that Jim Carlton's book totally misrepresents the Xerox episode, which is why it's useful to read what Raskin has to say) for more.