Thursday, January 17, 2008

Who copied who?

(Or is it Who copied whom? I never can tell.)

I always found the sheer amount of human effort in the Microsoft-copied-Apple interweb flamewars really funny.
First, the accusations: Microsoft stole X. And then Apple-copied-Microsoft responses. And the PARC history lessons. (Somebody should come up with the equivalent Godwin's Law for PARC and Windows/Mac OS flame wars.)

The OS-engineering world is pretty small. A surprising number of Windows employees have worked at Apple in the past. And vice versa. Are these guys stealing?

(The same happens at Boeing, apparently: A large number of Boeing engineers have also worked at Airbus. And the other way round.)

Another interesting note: Apparently, we hire an external company to do some of the Windows icons. A lot of those designers use Macs. (The Vista icons were a bit too Maccish for my tastes, which is why I asked around.)

Anyway: You-won't-believe-me time:
One of the Windows 7 features I came up with is also in Leopard. It is in this list.

(No, for obvious reasons I'm not going to say what the actual feature is. I like my job.)

I came up with the feature idea, designed it, prototyped it. My devs coded it (against the rules, very early in the first Win7 milestone, when we were supposed to do code cleanup and maintenance) and checked it into a side feature branch. A month later, the Leopard feature list is announced.

I swear I had no idea that Apple was working on the same thing in Leopard. How could I? Apple runs a pretty tight ship.

I'm pretty sure Apple had no idea about my feature. (Seriously, it is not the most headline-grabbing thing in that 300 list. It is a pretty handy feature, though.)

So, who copied who?

34 comments:

Randall said...

I have to say your no bullshit blogging with regards to Microsoft is refreshing. MS doesn't appeal to the geekish base the way that the open-source community does. It's part of the reason they get bashed all the time. e.g. It took me nearly a year before I could finally find an article online describing what the hell .NET actually was. All of the documents were magical marketing BS. Don't hype and fluff it up into some kind of guardian angel floating above my computer and making everything better (which seems to be the primary marketing tactic for all MS products), just tell me what the hell it is. If it's cool, I'll give you props. But if MS doesn't release specs, allow employees to discuss details about the OS, other technical details/problems, etc (whether they are all rosy or not), then your product sounds like meaningless marketing vaporware. Just IMO.

Czenda said...

The whole idea of "idea copying" is pointless. There is a limited number of features one can implement and no one should expect you woudln't, just because the others already have it, right? Quite the opposite I think.

Anyways: don't you reveal quite too much information about yourself already? Unless your employers approve this blog. I mean off the record of course.

Chaitanya said...

i think you are full of crap. Unless you stop stating such vague 'facts', nobody will believe you are indeed from microsoft and working on windows7.

Give us something 'real', sir.

Shawn Oster said...

Thanks for that post, I've never understood why people are so hot on the who copied who issue, but then again I'm a software developer so I'm used to everything cross-pollinating that way. Our entire nature is around seeing something and figuring out how to make it better or to see how it could work into our product.

@chaitanya: Does he win a prize if he "proves" who he is? Who really cares? It's not like he's saying he's the next messiah. I like to think positive and give people the benefit of the doubt, but even if you're the beady-eyed suspicious and distrustful sort it's not like he's asking for money or your first born. What do you lose by going with an innocent until proven guilty stance? Wait, you're not making life-changing, financial decisions based on this blog are you?

tuxplorer said...

Okay, at least tell us, that "feature" is new to Leopard or did it exist in Tiger? Because the single most feature Windows missed today more than anything else in the Mac OS X is AUTOMATOR.

FOTA said...

"One of the Windows 7 features I came up with is also in Leopard"

Obviously it's Bootcamp.

nature photographer said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
nature photographer said...

Okay, so maybe a good deal of features that Microsoft released in Vista were thought of before Apple announced them. So that wouldn't be stealing. But you'd have to admit, at least Apple thought of some things first, right? I mean, they were announced and put into use first, right? (And by "they" I mean features like live-search and Aero/Aqua. So maybe I'm wrong to say it's all copying... But at least Apple is ahead of the game, and surely Microsoft at least saw Apple's implementation of features before finally giving their versions to the public themselves, right?)

But I would like some real features for you to refer to. Take Vista for example. What features new to Tiger was Microsoft going to put into Vista before Apple announced them? I'm not saying you're wrong or Microsoft is copying or anything, I just would like actual examples.

Hey, if you thought of a feature for Windows 7 before it was announced for Leopard, good for you! :D I think pretty much everything new to Leopard was good, so that must be good news for Windows too, and Microsoft is lucky to have you. But I do want to point out, by the middle of 2006, most of the new features for Leopard were largely common knowledge, esp for people in the OS industry.

@fota: No way. He said it wasn't one of the main features, and BootCamp was special for duel booting, something you can already do on Windows, and even still you're not allowed to install OS X on non Apple hardware.

Steve said...

In the 2008 presidential election primary in the United States, most of the candidates hold the same position on hot issues as the other candidates from their party. It's not so much who believes in what anymore, it's who does what. It's who someone personally feels would do the right thing when in a tight spot, etc. For operating systems and other software, I feel that it's the same way. It's not what features you have, it's how they are implemented. Can you use it quickly and efficiently? Can you teach it to your 85 year old grandmother?

Personally, I think the feature is "Self Tuning TCP." Just thought I'd throw that out there.

Jono Hayward said...

@nature photographer:
If you want an example of where Microsoft announced a feature first, one of the ones you mentioned hit the nail on the head. I'm not 100% sure of the dates here, but if I'm right, Microsoft announced Vista (Longhorn back then)'s instant search capabilities at the October 2003 PDC. Apple didn't announce Tiger and Spotlight until April 2005. So while Apple did get it released first, Microsoft had clearly been thinking about it for a long time before that.

Albert said...

It's "Who copied whom?"

"Who" is an indirect object, like "Who used the computer?" ("Who" is doing something). "Whom" is a direct object.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Can you make some posts explaining exactly why Vista has uses so much memory? That'd be pretty interesting. I know that it now renders all layers of windows and such, but not much else.

Sean said...

Out of curiosity, do you really think you're adding value to the world with this blog?

If you really examine your reasons for writing this, you'll realize that you're just showing off that you're an MS "insider."

Wow. Amazing.

Nothing you're saying is of any value to the general conversation (seriously, why does someone care that you came up with some feature in Windows? Whoop-de-ding... I've shipped literally hundreds of features. Yay for me).

On behalf of everyone else working on Windows 7, just stop doing this. Go back to litebulb or blog internally.

Stop masturbating in public.

Steve said...

@sean: nobody is forcing you to read his blog. If you absolutely hate corporate transparency (or even slight translucency in this case) just go somewhere else and don't try to kill what little we've got.

nature photographer said...

Steve, to be fair, Sean's post said that he wants transparency of Windows 7, and that you're simply not providing any. Sure no one has to read your blog, but is that what you want?

Unknown said...

this blog is cool this blog is cool this blog is cool this blog is cool this blog is cool this blog is cool
tell us more about win7 tell us more about win7 tell us more about win7 tell us more about win7 tell us more about win 7 tell us more about win7 tell us more about win7 tell us more about win7
please please please plese please please please please please please please
i didnt used copy past i didt used copy past i didnt used copy past i didnt used copy past

MORE INFO ON WIN7 PLEASE! PLLEEEESE
ty

Sean said...

@steve

This isn't transparency. What has his opinions on Macworld got to do with transparency? Or a slashdot post about firefox?

All this guy is doing is flaunting the fact that he works on Windows 7, giving him an audience of people who are looking for tidbits and then just spouting his opinions.

Anonymous opinions on events and products are not transparency -- don't let yourself get fooled into thinking they are.

But bottom line for me, is that there are 100s of cool things in Windows 7, including things I'm working on, and I don't want this snotty little attention-grabber fucking it up.

:)

Steve said...

@sean and nature photographer: I understand that this isn't transparency, but it's at least a start. I agree that so far he has done nothing but flaunt his status. In fact, it really could be anyone behind this blog; it could be someone just trying to get attention.

Tyler V. said...

I am a web application developer, and let me tell you that it is hard to come up with new ideas. I recently spent a good two solid days creating an awesome mini-application for uploading multiple files, and auto detecting their extension and displaying file type icons etc. Only to find out that the very same thing can be found spread out through many popular web applications already.

I doubt Microsoft and Apple really copy each other that much. In the end I think it is just smart people coming up with good ideas, at the same relative time, at different companies.

Justin R. said...

@soma: I found your blog a few hours ago while clicking on buttons related to Windows 7. And, to be honest, I don't even have some fascination with Win7. I just work second shift in a data center, babysitting my company's mainframe (which essentially amounts to waiting for something to break and then calling someone who can fix it when it does). Consequently, I have an unwieldy amount of free time which I generally spend researching various topics. So that must have been how I got here.

But anyway, in the time since I got here I've read every entry you've posted, as well as any responses made to your entries, dating as far back as the archive goes. I've noticed that a lot of people have been making posts completely unrelated to your blogs, pressuring you to post details about the next Windows and what not. I just wanted to let you know that I've enjoyed all your entries so far, and I'm going to continue reading your blog just because I think its a good read.

nonarKitten said...

Just because someone's first doesn't make it copying - otherwise everyone with preemptive multitasking copied the Amiga. This is where patents are not defendable - imagine if someone in Commodore had patented "a light-weight round robin preemtive task scheduler" and proceeded to sue Apple (as of OSX), Microsoft (as of Windows NT)... really, if it's the only sensible way to do it, it's not copying, it's comming to the same conclusion.

mcgroobler said...

In case you care (I've heard some people have better things to do):

For Who and for Whom
Remember this hymn:
Use Whom wherever
You might have used him.

Who did? - He did!
Who copied whom? - He copied him!
Whose? His!

Back to work ...

Nikolaj said...

To me it seems, that the ones who participating in the “who copied who”-bullshit-contest are the same who really don’t get what software is: To them it’s just technology. To everyone else, it’s about a tool for making life easier.

Albert said...

@Nikolaj:
Sheesh, relax man. Just because someone has a talent in more than one field doesn't mean you have to attack them...calm down. No one even said it was a "contest" or took it that way, I simply answered the question in the parentheses. If you had a bad day, don't make it so obvious...

Dataland said...

... Microsoft has extra incentive to keep tight-lipped until they are actually ready to present something. Microsoft doesn't like bad press about features they cut, and I don't blame them. In the meantime, we'll have to settle for good old fashioned speculation. In fact, when I was a boy we didn't even have the internet, all we had was speculation. How times have changed. Now in this modern day, when hard facts are unavailable, we can speculate en mass! Hopefully...

CrossTalk: http://dataland.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/windows-7/

Chris R said...

Couple of things:
1) When you are dealing with a limited problem space people with similar backgrounds will tend to develop similar solutions. Its not so much copying as parallel evolution.
2) TCP tuning is already in Vista. Has been since the earlier betas. The autotuning features came out of the web100 project. It was first incorporated into linux, then vista, then OS X. Supposedly they're working on a freeBSD port as well.

Anonymous said...

It's like when two people say the same thing at the same time. There's no such thing as Jean Grey or Professor X, but there's something like... er... thinking the same good idea?

Even if it's "coping", come on.
Your friend likes Blablabla burger. You go out with him. You don't know Blablabla burger. He shows you Blablabla burger. Now, everyday you eat Blablabla burger, because if fits you, maybe more than it does for your friend. Is that coping? Stealing?

Nubizus said...

I don't understand one simple thing.
How company big as Microsoft can't make ui/gui outstanding work?

1. Make team inside company for Design.
2. Understand that we are living in user centric environment and coping apple gui is a lame thing.
3. Gui an ui design must be done in harmony with
usability and legacy of previous windows versions, but now after Vista blowup you have a chance for real inovation (you know ZUI/Multi-touch etc.) .
4. Do research, focus groups and don"t be afraid of
inovation.

No body will care about coping, when your product have ingredients of innovation.

Good luck with 7.

MetaVoIP said...

Let's see.
Why did Bill spend all that time and effort developing Word on Mac?

So that MS could understand how Mac worked. And then apply it back into Windows.

Bill wasn't stupid. He saw something good and wanted to learn from it to make his product better.

Is that good? or is that bad?

I don't know, but that makes a business sense since he could not buy out key employees and kill the company like Wendin DOS.

  said...

"Who copied who?

(Or is it Who copied whom? I never can tell.)"
---
'tain't hard: substitute he/him for who/whom and ask yourself which one sounds right?

In this case, which sounds right-
Who copied he, or
Who copied him?

Who copied him sounds right, so you want to say Who copied whom.

Note the "m" on the end of both him and whom.
===
Who's on first is an entirely different matter.

APVangeliLMS said...

i bet its the delete trash button.

Lewis said...

I do have to say, you guys with your limited innovation idea's are stupid, im a mac user, i know they coppied widgets and search bar off Mac's.

The think is, innovation and imagination is unlimited.

Firefox could make new idea that for more tab space they make a firefox flipping animation which flips around onto a clean side fresh where you can flip back and forth, or Microsoft can make 2 start bars just incase one freezes or some stupid idea.

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