Microsoft Responds To "Like OS X" Comment 505
Z80xxc! writes "After a comment by a Microsoft employee claiming in an interview that 'what we [Microsoft] have tried to do with Windows 7... is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics,' the Windows 7 team has issued an official rebuttal, saying that the comment came from an employee who was 'not involved in any aspect of designing Windows 7,' and that it was 'inaccurate and uninformed.'"
ego (Score:5, Insightful)
Random person thinks he knows everything, grows an ego and tells "juicy" stuff to press to boost that said ego while actually knowing nothing.
Nothing to see here. But I suspect lots of Linux/Mac OSX fanatics will be coming in 3.. 2.. 1..
Re:ego (Score:5, Funny)
I suspect lots of Linux/Mac OSX fanatics will be coming in 3.. 2.. 1..
I came as fast as I could! Just let me get my breath back and I'll start bashing whoever the bad guy is in the story! Who is it today? MacDonalds? Apple? Microsoft? Jack Thompson?
Re:ego (Score:5, Insightful)
For every Off-topic mod you get, you'll be almost guaranteed one Insightful mod. As long as you're against Jack Thompson. Which I am!
Re:ego (Score:4, Insightful)
Jack Thompson as Ronald McDonald would be scary.
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In related news, John Riccitiello was spotted at Denny's texting on his Blackberry.
Re:ego (Score:5, Funny)
..0 ....
OMGBBQ!!!!! Gnome is bettar than both!!!!! and anyway it all comes from PARC work blah blah GEM blah blah Amiga blah
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Who mod parent a troll?! Have you no sense of humor, sir?
Re:ego (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe it's a KDE user who did it.
Re:ego (Score:5, Funny)
I doubt a KDE user would do it, they'd have to spend too long looking through the huge array of buttons and options that do similar things in order to just be at the end of desperation, push one of them in the hope it does the right thing.
Re:ego (Score:5, Insightful)
Save face? (Score:5, Insightful)
They ain't trying to save face. They are trying to save a lawsuit loss (i.e., money).
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Re:Save face? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Except Apple's look and feel lawsuit against Microsoft has already been thrown out. About 20 years ago. So Microsoft can copy "look and feel" all they want, they have the legal precedents to do so.
Uhhh... no. According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], Apple won because the court ruled that:
"Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]."
and, that (and this is a Wikipedia quote):
"The court established that Apple could not make copyri
Re:Save face? (Score:4, Informative)
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in other news, Microsoft employee says "iPhone is better than WinMobile", cue Microsoft fanbois to criticise employee and distract everyone from the frickin' obvious.
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iPhone is better than WinMobile
There's nothing new or newsworthy about that statement...
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Advertising laws have been twisted so much that we're allowed to use subjective lies, but you can be sacked for giving away facts... roll on 1984. It's late. Very, very late. But not never...
Put aside the ego... (Score:2)
Who cares about them, though! For the rest of us, it's a non-issue. Lets face it - the best thing about the Macs *is* their interface. It certainly isn't the overpriced hardware and its limited capacity for upgradeabiity. If Microsoft can sell me a similar interface without these issues, then that's a plus for me. Yay! Capitalism!
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I'm torn! On the one hand, I don't think you can legitimately call Microsoft learning from a competitor a debacle on their part. On the other hand, I can see from your sig that you loathe the usurping and stupid SI versions of computer memory terms and their pandering to the brainless as much as I do!
So I'll merely lament your inappropriate modding as Flamebait. Slashdot's getting so that you can't post anything without getting a Flamebait or Troll mod unless you write like you're talking to a very spoi
Re:Put aside the ego... (Score:4, Informative)
Don't try to bullshit the rest of us. Windows gets shoved down our collective throats so we can't help but have experience with it. This isn't like MacOS where you're only ever going to have experience with it if you explicitly seek it out.
Need encryption? Try using a tool that explicitly ensures it. There is even a "checkbox" for it.
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He's not really that random, he's the "partner group manager with Microsoft", LinkedIn says he's the SMB & Distribution Director at Microsoft Ltd [linkedin.com]. He's kinda high up there, and in my opinion that's a huge slip, to say on record your company took inspiration from your main competitor. Can you imagine how bad it would sound if Chevy said "We wanted the look and feel of the Ford Mustang when we created the new Camaro". I'd be surprised if he wasn't looking fo
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Why would they even bother to deny it? It's not like they tried to deny their Microsoft store inspiration. If anything, they were being blatant about their inspiration.
OS X does have a nice UI. If they did take some Win 7 ideas from OS X to improve Windows, then I think they did a decent balancing job between outright copying, and failing miserably. That said, they should have paid more attention to details past the first layer of the UI. There are still far too many obscure clicks or info overload to get t
Re:ego (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/10/30/ [penny-arcade.com]
Re:ego (Score:5, Funny)
so did xkcd. [xkcd.com]
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they've been copying Mac all along... (Score:2)
Re:they've been copying Mac all along... (Score:5, Insightful)
So Mac copied Xerox Star, and Windows Copied Mac? Do you know who copied whom for OS/2, Amegia Workbench, NeXT, Linux, BeOS, and GeoWorks; all of which have similar WIMP interfaces?
It would be silly to say that any (other than STAR) evolved in a vacuum; but "borrowing ideas" has happened in every direction.
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Yep, toally agree.
A lot of people applaud OS X for it's great interface, and these same people then bash MS for admitting that they let it influence their design! If a piece of software has a good look and feel then competitors are obviously going to take this into consideration. If they don't then they get left behind. I mean come on, honestly Microsoft, you're telling us that you never once took a look at Apple's operating system and thought "Hmm that bit is pretty good. We could use something similar."
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More to the point: what on earth is wrong with copying good interface ideas? As a Microsoft stockholder I'd be far more upset if they *didn't* look at Mac OS when designing Windows!
Re:they've been copying Mac all along... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you ever saw the Triumph of the Nerds documentary by Bob Cringely, you'd have seen Steve Jobs saying [youtube.com] "Picasso had a saying Good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless in stealing great ideas."
Of course, in the same documentary he also says [youtube.com] "The only problem with Microsoft is that they just have no taste" :)
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It was all a fractured metaphor.
The idea was that your computer desktop would be like your physical desktop. This has likely done more to thwart usability in subsequent incarnations than any Frankensteinish idea from Microsoft ever could. Sure, maybe it made sense when files were very application specific. If I wanted to open up a letter, I'd open up my mailbox that's sitting on my desk. If I wanted to dispose of a page, I'd put it in the trashcan that I keep on my desk. The TV would be on my desk. As wou
GeoWorks (Score:2)
Man, I miss GeoWorks. Especially that pushpin on menus. Anybody else remember and miss that?
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As a person who spent years using a Star and the earlier Alto, I'd say that if you eliminate Xerox's ideas from the original Mac OS and Windows, there wouldn't be much left.
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For sure the prime source of inspiration and functions for Windows comes from Apple's work! And maybe now and then from somewhere else. So I'm more inclined to believe the interviewed employee than the higher-up managers refuting it. Of course they can not admit they simply copy Apple, after all.
I installed Windows7 and to me it looks the bastard child of KDE4 and XP. I didn't see a whole lot of Mac in there.
To me, Mac is that little parabolic taskbar thingie (doc?) with the hopping icons on the bottom that is not really a task bar, disks that are icons directly on the desktop (as opposed to "My Computer") and the menu bar on the top that confuses most normal people because it changes with whichever application is active. None of that is in 7.
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"What happens if they get into schools or colleges and start posing as staff or faculty?"
Sadly that has already happened long ago. Shitty profs are shitty profs. And, I'd rather have a shitty prof JUST out of school (who may actually understand the internet and at the very least may post notes) rather than a shitty OLD prof who sucks and doesn't understand this new-fangled internet thing.
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Things not to do if you like your job (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pretty sure on the list of 'Things not to do if you like your job', admitting you're inspired by the competition and complimenting their design TO THE PRESS has got to be in the top 3.
You mean like Bill himself has done? [youtube.com]
They were caught telling the truth. (Score:2)
Always a classic screw-up.
Re:Things not to do if you like your job (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Things not to do if you like your job (Score:5, Funny)
In my defense, that mop was a slut
What Apple does right (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple and Microsoft attack the problem of user interface from two completely different points of view. Microsoft wants things to be orthogonal, logical, menu driven, hierarchical, and otherwise fully featured. Apple takes the approach that the user doesn't want to fuss with all sorts of menus and submenus (no two button mouse for years!) and just wants to do what they need as simply as possible. So you end up with two completely different interfaces.
Apple's interface is elegant but inflexible. Everything fits into the existing scheme and runs perfectly within that scheme.
Windows' interface is flexible but clumsy. While this has gotten much better in later versions, we're still looking at deeply nested menus, and applications which do not necessarily have any UI themes in common with each other.
However the key point is that Microsoft is gradually becoming more user-centric. As far as that goes in their own perspective. They are making changes to the OS that were implemented in Mac years ago, and now that they are here, they make Windows a better product.
Aesthetics is a major theme with Apple, and it is one that Microsoft hadn't fully embraced until Vista. Listen to the users. Let the users tell you what is good and bad. Build the interface to match the user.
In a sense, the MS employee was right. Microsoft is doing a lot to emulate Apple. And frankly, it's about time.
For everything Apple does one way (Score:2)
they seem to go the other with iTunes.
I still see no reason for Apple to not allow sizing windows from any corner, let alone hiding/moving the Apple bar at top.
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Re:What Apple does right (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the problems OS X has is that it lacks the ability to use these menus through the keyboard easily. In Windows I can hit the Alt key, and quickly see all the menus I can open by using an other key (the letter used for the menu item will have an underscore). Such as Alt + F is the file menu.
Each menu item then can be accessed usually through an access key. So Alt - F - S would be save. I know in both Windows and Mac OS X you have direct save short cuts too, and you can configure short cuts to common items, but that's not I want.
What I want is to be able to access a menu list from the keyboard quickly while exploring, not remember various different short cuts.
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Right click? What is this right click you speak of?
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It's the button you gain when you throw away Apple's shitty bundled mouse and plug something in that doesn't suck. The ADB mouse was the last good mouse Apple made (though the new glass trackpad is very enjoyable to use). The puck was of course so bad I don't expect even Apple fanboys to defend it, the "Pro Mouse" had nothing inherently wrong with it, but was simply uninteresting given that it lacked a scroll wheel and a minimum of three buttons. Since then they've tried twice to provide the missing inpu
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When you say contextual menu, you mean the right-click menu?
Cause this isn't what I am talking about.
What I am talking about there is a menu options in Tools -> Options -> Random Area -> Some Option. In Windows (most anyhow, and most linux apps too), the underlines appear when I hold down alt (I used italics to demonstrate where this will be). I can then go Alt + T + U + R and then use arrow buttons to get too Some Option.
How do you do this in Mac OS X?
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You press Control-F2 and use the cursor keys to get to Some Option.
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Which is slower, as I mentioned in a reply to another poster who brought this up.
Might not be important to some people, but to me, it's a feature I miss in Mac OS X land.
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Okay, try this...
1) CTRL-F2 (yes, yes, bear with me)
2) Type the first letter of the menu item you want*
3) Down arrow
4) Repeat step 2
5) Repeat 2-3 until you drill down to the desired command and hit "enter"
* If by chance there are two menu items with the same first letter, it's sufficient to type the first and second letter.
How is this slower if not more efficient than ALT-whatever?
Only happy to help.
Re:What Apple does right (Score:4, Informative)
System Prefs > Mouse & Keyboard > Keyboard shortcuts*.
A quick look tells me that CTRL-F2 puts focus on the menubar, CTRL-F3 places focus on the Dock, etc etc. OSX has had this since (someone correct if i'm wrong) since at least 10.2 .
So, that's about enough of this "can't navigate in OSX without the mouse" propaganda. [/wishful thinking]
* Apologies if the wording isn't exact as i'm translating from the italian.
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On the mac you can hold down the control key or right click to get a contextual menu. Try it, you might like it.
I think what the parent is talking about are accelerators. Menu captions in Windows can include an an ampersand which indicates the accelerator key to be used. The letters appears with an underline underneath them (under XP and higher you may need to press ALT first to display the menu accelerators depending on the user settings). They be accessed when ALT & accelerator key is pressed.
So, for example to display the File menu's conetent, you can press ALT & F and then to select the "New" option once
Re:What Apple does right (Score:4, Informative)
One of the problems OS X has is that it lacks the ability to use these menus through the keyboard easily
Remembering the shortcuts on Macs is usually easier because they are consistent (ignoring the three different ways I have of making Apple's video-playing apps run full screen, and the fourth way that VLC uses). On Windows, an entire key on the keyboard is reserved for going to the menu bar. This is something that most users don't do - they either click on the menu with the mouse or hit shortcuts directly - and so on OS X is a chord. By default, it's control-F2, but it's configurable in System Preferences, so if you want it to be something easier to hit then you can change it.
Re:What Apple does right (Score:5, Informative)
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why you think pressing keys to explore the menu is better than using the mouse.
Because then I don't have to remove my hands from the keyboard. Seems obvious enough.
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This is Control-F2 on OS X. This selects the menu and allows to browse it with the cursor keys.
Alt+character has always been the way to type various special characters and ligatures on the Mac. Wasting this for another way to access menu entries instead was never an option for an OS that grew up with DTP.
Re:What Apple does right (Score:4, Informative)
Definitely sounds like person who has only used a Mac on occasion. I used to think like you about it until I actually used a Mac for a while. Actually I find OS X and most OS X applications to be more keyboard-friendly than Windows. Every single command you use frequently has or can be assigned a command-something combination (or control-something). So things like open, close, print, save are always assigned the same command key sequence across all apps. That's a time saver right there. Why alt-f-s when command-s will do? While most Windows users will actually click on file->save to save their document, very few Mac users I've seen bother with clicking on the menus for most common tasks; it's all done with the keyboard.
As was said earlier in the discussion, OS X and Windows come from very different philosophies. You speak of how you want to explore the menu. On OS X that's absolutely wrong. If you have to explore the menu to find something, then someone screwed up. Deep, nested menus are considered bad on OS X. Besides, alt-something-something-something reminds me of emacs!
There are many inconsistencies in OS X that are legitimate grievances. But not being able to alt-something-something-something the menu doesn't appear to me to be that important. I'm far more frustrated on a daily basis by how OS X eats the click that focuses a window (now I use command-tab and command-` to focus windows anyway without the mouse), that you have enable keyboard navigation in dialog boxes as it's off by default, and that carbon and cocoa apps behave so differently.
Both systems have their inconsistencies, and both are getting better in this regard. And from what I can tell from using Windows 7, Windows is getting more usable and mac-like all the time.
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That was only a simplified example. Not a very good one (as everyone can remember Ctrl+S). But some applications on both platforms can potentially have a lot of shortcuts.
Which is a good thing, but not a replacement. There are some applications w
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I actually agree with you, but yet look at the Office 2007 UI.
It does a great job of solving the problems you state, options that aren't relevant are hidden, and only options relevant in the context of what you are doing are shown. To me this is a much better way of doing things, and yet the amount of people who complain, the amount who hate it far outnumber those who like it- OpenOffice and Firefox have recieved the same feedback when they suggested the same type of change to a UI that only provides what i
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Interesting. My background is cpm/dos/windows/(lately)linux and a few years ago i was messing about with a bondi blue iMac on OS7. I found it hard to get it to do anything, it couldn't see any win or linux boxes or any printers on the lan, which I half expected, but there didn't seem to be much in the way of configuration for the network or the screen or indeed any hardware compared with the equivalent win95/98. Maybe what I want to do isn't what Apple expects me to want to do?
I would welcome the chance to
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You were using System 7 and you're complaining about it not networking properly with modern operating systems? You do realize that System 7 is from 1991, right?
Somehow I'm reminded of when I did a stint in tech support a few years ago and some guy called in having issues with getting his custom A1200T (custom as in, typical Amiga system where only the motherboard is actually an original component) to use certain features built into the ADSL CPE we had sent him...
/Mikael
Re:What Apple does right (Score:4, Insightful)
users. Let the users tell you what is good and bad. Build the interface to match the user.
The interesting thing here is that your evidence doesn't match the examples.
Microsoft puts every single thing they do in front of users, and tests it to death. Apple puts some really smart, good designers in a room and they do what they think is best. (overly simplified, but you get the idea)
One of the first things Jobs did when he came to Apple was to kill the UI research group. They have a unified, attractive and logical interface because they keep it tightly controled and don't let groups of just anyone come in and tell them to change things. They're also secretive to the point of paranoia, which means they'd never be able to do user testing groups before launch of anything.
Microsoft is bland because every single thing they do is tested over and over and over again with user groups, which gives them a lot of data, but means they end up with the lowest common denominator on everything.
You can make your own decision on which is better.
I actually read something that made the case that Microsoft was too consumer focussed. This is around the time when MS had just got the security religion and the person said that until then, nobody was asking for security in their focus groups and market research, just features and compatibility with older software. Geeks were asking for security, but they made up a relatively small number of people in the market. When worms,viri and root-kits and all that started being more and more prevelent, people started asking for security, and so MS started doing security.
Short version: Ask your users what they need all you want, but you're always going to be a reactive organization, and you're never going to surprise anyone, because they'll always just get what they ask for. If you make educated guesses what they need, you'll sometimes blow them away with something awesome.
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So, what you're basically saying is that Apple designs their interfaces to be intuitive, and Microsoft... doesn't.
Yup, that pretty much covers it.
But to be fair, you have to remember that Microsoft wasn't originally targeting yuppy thirty-somthethings and college students, they were going for business programmers and well, nerds. This is a completely different audience than Apple, and frankly, they hit the mark. Nerds don't want intuitive. Nerds want it the way they want it. This kind of interface is great
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So? (Score:5, Insightful)
We are living in a twisted, perverted world, where one can't express an opinion without being beheaded by both the press and the company he's working for. God help us all!
Hi (Score:5, Funny)
I'm a Mac and Windows 7 was MY idea
employee who 'inaccurate and uninformed' (Score:4, Insightful)
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I suspect you haven't fired many people.
Hello Streisand (Score:4, Insightful)
But anyway, considering that Apple has put a huge amount of effort into streamlining their OS and making it more responsive to the user, just in general I think that's a good thing to emulate in your OS. For example, I can remember waiting on 10.0 and 10.1 for what seemed like eternities for the spinning beach ball to quit but that's gotten a lot better with recent releases. (Don't get me started on if you were trying to log onto an ftp server that wasn't responding.)
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Well, considering that I had no idea what that guy said until I read it here, I'd say MS is putting more fuel on the fire by saying that. Would it have ended up on slashdot even if MS hadn't issued the denial? Maybe, but by denying it, it ensured it ended up on slashdot.
Who said Microsoft cares about whats on slashdot front page? Nothing really "good" from Microsoft is likely going to be news here anyways.
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It would be quite a brilliant move. I imagine that people would be more likely to look at Win7 now if there's a possibility that it was closer to Mac. That's like saying, "We tried to copy the Ferrari design cues. Ferrari engines still suck though, because they're, umm, unreliable."
This is not like OS X! (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft has issued an official rebuttal: "We never used OS X as a source of inspiration in the design of Windows 7. This is completely uninformed. We used KDE 4 instead".
As reported on by zdnet australia (Score:4, Insightful)
"We never used OS X as a source of inspiration in the design of Windows 7. This is completely uninformed. We used KDE 4 instead".
That's not far from the truth.
Or at least, if you tell people KDE4 is Windows 7, they believe it [zdnet.com.au].
Ideas don't occur in a vacuum (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think Windows would do better to take pages from the KDE book, but maybe that's just personal taste.
I think people would like it, as per my other comment: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1440748&cid=30072032 [slashdot.org]
Should've named it Vista7 or Vista-II instead.. (Score:2)
Weve taken everything thats good about Vista, along with the core infrastructure of the operating system, and weve made it faster and slimmed down the code to make it more effective.
Weve also tried to listen to what customers want in terms of a much slicker user interface and the ability to engage with it far more intuitively. Thats the product that were delivering.
Why are the reviews saying 7 is completely different to Vista, and will be a success? I can only see more disaster for MS. I checked with a few retail outlets in India; and the feedback is that customers are removing 7 andloading Pirated XP instead. I feel this means Corporates will 'up'grade 7 to XP for the time being then.
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Because the reality is, after a while Vista really wasn't all that bad.
I ran it for just over a year before 7 came out without a single flaw whatsoever. Vistas biggest problem was it was pretty crappy in it's earlier days and it never really managed to shake off that image.
I guess the situation in your area isn't representative, because Windows 7 adoption is currently well above Vista adoption.
Windows 7 has certainly been rather successful so far and it seems to have a much better public image than Vista ea
That was close (Score:2)
Paging Mr. Balmer (Score:2)
Look and Feel (Score:3, Interesting)
Considering Apple's litigious nature and the fact that it once sued Microsoft for allegedly infringing on the MacOS "look and feel", I can easily see why Microsoft would want to distance itself from this guy's statements. Apple has always wanted to have exclusive rights over Mac-like graphical interfaces, damn the negative consequences to the rest of the industry.
This guy's statements are fodder for Apple's bloodthirsty lawyers. Should it turn out he's lying about Microsoft's intentions, firing him would seem to be the best course of action.
Sounds like.... (Score:2)
sounds like someone doesn't want to get sued by apple for defamation.
Someone got called out (Score:3, Insightful)
So some clueless employee in a company of tens of thousands of employees made a comment on the record. If this was an employee on one of the design teams, and it was a comment in an email to their manager and said email leaked, there would be a story and a lawsuit. However it wasn't, it just happened to be conjecture by someone that pulled their comment out of their ass.
The employee should have known better to make such a comment to begin with and is likely now /very/ aware of Microsoft's press policy.
What the employee did was no different from a factory worker for Ford that spends their day driving new cars into the parking lot making a comment about the design inspiration for the F-150. To be frank, I'll be surprised if the employee doesn't get fired, they certainly have cause.
Duh! (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing to see here (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh man, the number of times I've heard one of the BD/marketing guys spouting off about some shit he has only been paid to sell, not understand and I've thought, man, seriously hope no one he is talking to has a clue, because, really, if they do, we are going to look like dicks right now.
This shit happens a hundred times a day all over the world, BD/marketing guys spout shit, what we pay them for, apparently, just happens this time someone wrote it down where people who know better could see.
Nothing MS speci
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Re:If this is true... (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 7 is still clunky, slow, and unstable.
Citation needed. I use Windows 7 and it's certainly not one of those.
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Windows 7 is still clunky, slow, and unstable.
Citation needed. I use Windows 7 and it's certainly not one of those.
Which one of them is it not?
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Then they did a terrible job copying OSX. Windows 7 is still clunky, slow, and unstable. It's nothing like OSX at all.
I threw Win7 onto my MacBook Pro via BootCamp for work reasons and it's running fine. Heck, I even managed to get the 64-bit version running on it without any issues.
I've had no crashes and it feels a little speedier than Vista. So far it's looking like it's not a bad release.
Now I don't get the OSX and Win7 comparison, they don't look that much alike.
Re:If only.... (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm... Windows Vista and onwards is more secure out of the box. I mean, Mac OS X hasn't even really implemented ASLR yet. That Mac OS X is more secure is a common misconception.
Read this: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/hack-windows-security-snow-leopard,8704.html [tomshardware.com]
Charlier Miller [wikipedia.org] covers why he thinks Windows is more secure than Mac OS X.
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Yes, no problem.
The fact that OS X has never had a virus or worm (don't know how true this is) doesn't necessary show the platform is secure.
It well know that the scale of market share of Windows VS OS X more than tilts towards Windows. This means, as attacker, Windows is the most profitable to target. Hence we see more exploits.
It's like if I owned one house in Harlem and the other in Luxembourg. The house in Harlem would more than likely being broken into quicker than the on in Luxembourg. This is externa
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Firewire.
Apple Desktop Bus (which was copied and improved a bit by Intel, and named USB).
There's two.
~Philly
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You seem to be one of those people who don't get it. It's not any one individual feature, or lots of them that makes OS X polished. It's how they work together, and how usable they are (usability is all about hiding complexity or exposing the absolute minimum necessary to get something accomplished in an as intuitive way as possible).
And this is where OS X shines. When I first switched to it from years of mental abuse from Redmond, I felt naked without complexity (where is my regedit, computer icons on desk