Windows Copies the Mac? Shhh, That’s Our Little Secret!
By Harry McCracken | Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 5:53 pm
[UPDATE: Microsoft’s Windows blogger Brandon LeBlanc has disowned Aldous’s comments.]
This is amusing: Simon Aldous, a “Microsoft partner group manager” in the UK, gave an interview to British tech site PCR in which he says that Microsoft wanted to give Windows 7 a “Mac look and feel”:
One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. We’ve significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it’s built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.
I’m guessing that Aldous is far enough removed from Redmond that he forgot you aren’t supposed to say things like that. (I mean, nobody involved with New Coke cheerfully told us that the goal with it was to make Coke taste more like Pepsi.) But the funny thing is, the only part of Windows 7 that strikes me as newly Mac-like is the Taskbar, whose bigger, unlabeled icons do indeed look more like OS X’s Dock.
On a meta-level, every version of Windows has cribbed from the Mac, and the versions released in this decade (Windows XP, Vista, and 7) all draw overall inspiration from the polished look of Apple OS X. But Windows 7 has its own perfectly pleasant aesthetic. I ultimately prefer Snow Leopard’s–it’s more subdued and consistent–but if you told me you liked Windows 7’s flashier feel, I wouldn’t argue the point.
Oh, and a side topic: As a heavy user of both Vista and OS X, I’d love to get the details on how “the core Vista technology” is far more stable than OS X…not that both operating systems aren’t capable of crashing spectacularly in the right circumstances.
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pks4» Blog Archive » Linkpost | 11.12.2009 Says:
November 12th, 2009 at 2:02 pm[…] Windows Copies the Mac? Shhh, That’s Our Little Secret! and How we really designed the look and feel of Windows 7 – A Microsoft executive says the […]
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Dear Microsoft: Stop Trying So Hard | Technologizer Says:
November 16th, 2009 at 11:01 pm[…] in response to Apple. Windows 7? Inspired by Mac OS X — even something some within Microsoft are prepared to admit. Microsoft Stores? Strangely Apple-like, their Geniuses are called “Answer desk […]
November 11th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
I hope that Simon Aldous has his resume up-to-date.
Steve is going to go apeshit.
November 11th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Windows copies some of Mac. Mac copies some of Windows. It has been that way for years. Nothing new here except the amazingly public statement about it.
November 11th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
“[Windows 7] it’s built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform…”
Seems strange that the product manager is saying that, when OS X is built on UNIX and when Windows is not. Haven’t we come to accept UNIX as the de facto standard in stability?
November 11th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
Ever since Microsoft stole Apples stolen Xerox crap, its just been a game of back and fourth fun.
November 12th, 2009 at 2:00 am
Of course Windows copies stuff of the mac, as does OSX copy from windows (I couldn’t believe the semitransparent menubar and reflective dock when Leopard came out for example: those are clearly ‘flashy’ elements answering to Windows Vista’s Aero)
But I really don’t think that’s a problem. It’s even necessary to have good OS’s! Where would we be if nobody copied the GUI for example? Or multitasking? Or the interface of a browser? Sometimes there is just a ‘right’ way to do something, and all you can do then is copying it: otherwise your product stays behind and becomes obsolete.
November 12th, 2009 at 5:47 am
Nobody complained when Apple finally added proper multitasking to Mac OS in 2001, that it had been ‘done before’ now did they? Windows moved away from cooperative multitasking with Windows 95.
November 12th, 2009 at 9:50 am
“Nobody complained when Apple finally added proper multitasking to Mac OS in 2001, that it had been ‘done before’ now did they? Windows moved away from cooperative multitasking with Windows 95.”
There’s a difference between checking a check box on your Windows 95 product brochure that says “multitasking” and actually implementing multitasking WELL, as you see in UNIX-base systems, like OSX.
And, as for stability, multitasking or not, I had better up-time with non-UNIX Mac OS 8 than I did with Win 95. Your mileage may vary.
November 12th, 2009 at 11:38 am
OS9 was terrible. I remember how animations on a web page would stop when you held the mouse button down, and that awful menu bar task manager. Thankfully OSX coped Windows 95 and started showing running programs along the bottom of the screen. They even copied the ‘minimise’ feature, before that all we could do was make the window show only its title bar.
November 17th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
A lot of people are stating that Macintosh copied things that windows did. It's more like Apple got ideas, and spawned a better one from what Windows did. Apple was the first to have applications have a launch icon in that bottom bar (OSX 10.0) weren't they? And they didn't copy windows media center, they wanted to make it better (front row). They didn't like that remoted needed 30+ buttons, so they designed theirs to only need 6 buttons.
As far as it is, windows likes to take an idea and copy it to a point where it doesn't seem like an exact copy. But still, everyone says it's a crappy copy. Meanwhile, macintosh gets ideas and innovates. They don't copy, they innovate.
According to GUI, I heard that Apple bought it from Xerox not stole, so that needed to be settled as well.
Unix is also 10x more stable than windows core. The registry in Windows sucks, because it's too corruptable. And windows is still DLL hell. Good job windows making your GUI aesthetically acceptable. Now work on your actual operating system. As far as I'm concerned, since windows 98, everything has just been a graphic redo for windows. Apple has looked nearly the same since OSX, because they're not too concerned with graphics. They get their stuff working better, not just looking better.
Windows<MacintoshOSX