In the past, I’ve heard both sides of the argument — which has usually involved the Apple side blaming Microsoft and the Microsoft side blaming Apple — and after at least 3 years of being a part of that crowd, I’ve taken the high road the past year (while still doing my part to convert people over to the light side; Apple’s). When you look past the petty fights and ‘fanboy’ arguments, you can see the bigger picture.⌘

I bumped into Paul Thurott’s post about Apple copying (he didn’t thankfully use the word ‘stole’) features from Microsoft’s Vista. Then, I ran into Dwight Silverman’s rebuttal post, where he looks into the past of those said features. Read carefully, we see that many of those features have existed in Unix based OSs (I rather not carry out an investigation of an investigation, I just believe him), which gave me a few thoughts.⌘

The non-Mac, Mac community

With Leopard, Apple finally has a fully compliant Unix OS. The interesting thing is that we know one more platform which has a decently big but creative community — Linux. Many features which turn up in these distros is thought up and implemented by the community, which makes licensing and patenting much less of a pain. The Unix base makes implementing them easier. And the fact that un-pressed developers are more creative than the ones who are being pushed to come up with new features, should give Apple ideas. The only problem will be name-calling and arguments with the Linux community, but hey, at least they have a perfect repository of ideas if they ever need them.⌘

Microsoft’s development cycles have been something of a joke. Also, their need for backwards compatibility forces them to reuse much of their code, which ultimately ends up causing a source code muddle. I’ve heard that the reason Vista took so long because they started with the XP code, decided it was crap and they would need something better if they wanted to achieve the level of security they were aiming for, and finally ended up starting from scratch. All this keeps them from properly implementing a lot of features which they might or might not ‘borrow’. They plan to change it with Windows 7¹, but we’ll keep that discussion for a future day.⌘

My point is that Apple can innovate and implement faster. Jobs will make sure the implementation is the best for that time, and it doesn’t matter if they copy features or not. What matters is that the feature is being main-streamed, and is something that more people (a whole 8% more) will get to use and enjoy it.⌘

We know that ultimately a feature that becomes popular will show up in all operating systems. So the whole argument of copying features doesn’t really matter. For my part, I am glad Apple has stepped up their advertising (even if it does involve some Vista bashing), and saying that Microsoft ‘copied’ their ideas is a good way to discredit them. They have copied things in the past.⌘

Finally, it’s the Linux community which will lose out, but meh, open source is dead² anyway.⌘