Maynard is mostly right about, but seems to leave out the innovations in Vista – WPF (Avalon) is a very interesting development in UI development, and XAML is also an interesting part of that. As for the new UI, we have not seen it yet, but the crucial part, really, is taht advanced UI development will be enabled with this new technology (and probably abused, at least for a while).

As opposed to the wasted days spent reinstalling XP when (inevitably) the registry cruds out, or a virus creeps through? Bargain.

And four updates at about one hundred quid a pop is how much?

But Microsoft has survived the last few years, at least on the OS front, by promising jam tomorrow. XP is looking very very hoary right now: remember when it was released? 2001. No, really. Nearly five years ago. I really don’t give a shit if Bill’s dev-team rips off Apple; in fact, I would welcome it if it means that Microsoft would actually ship product.

One of the most interesting bits about Vista is probably the “External Memory Devices”, which is where you plug in a device on a USB port and the system uses it as sort of a super virtual memory.

It certainly makes me wonder how many flash keydrives have the read-write cycles to cope.

I remember a Mac enthusiast friend of mine used to make fun of the Ctrl and Alt buttons on my keyboard. “**We** don’t need those,” he said. He never understood my amusement at the propeller button whose name he didn’t know, or at the old-fashioned, single-button mouse. One time I asked him how to turn his off because I couldn’t find the CPU (oddly, he had his – what do you call it? sculpture? functional art? – under a towel), to which he sniffed that “Apples have the power button on the front, where it belongs.” Fine, wive la difference and all that, but where is the box? Y’know, the box you paid an extra thousand for so you could boast about having features you never use?

He owns a Dell today, front panel power button and all. It is possible to do too much “original” work. Lisa. Newton.

As for the issue of copying features in general, that works in both directions (fast user switching, multi-button scroll mice, Media Center facilities—assuming Apple gets around to adding them eventually). MS’s promiscuity in borrowing ideas is a good thing (provided, of course, they’re not infringing patents)—and it’s preferable to Apple’s periodic bouts of ‘not invented here’ stubborness—as in the case of mice and, going farther back, CDR drives and DVD recordable formats. Apple has, after all, gradually copied all of the elements of the ‘Wintel’ hardware design—now to the point where new Macs are going to be modified PC-clones (to develop software for the coming Intel-based Macs, you run Mac OS on a standard Intel box).

Anno-nymous—I think you missed the point of my comment… the reason the claims are ‘ridiculous’ is that someone like Gates called them ‘innovative’ when they’re already on display in MacOS X; in other words, exactly your point.

I’m not disputing the whole “prior art” thing here. And god knows, I love me some Mac: OS X was an infinite improvement over what came before (granted, it shared only a name with what came before)—I’m just pointing out that every company does stuff like this.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Steal (or “improve,” whatever) other people’s ideas, and call it ‘innovative’, I don’t care—it’s good for the rest of us.

What’s laughable here is (a) the notion of the ‘Apple partisan’, and (b) the belief that some of them have, that somehow, someone like Gates is guilty of something like this but that someone like Steve Jobs should be walking around with a snow-white conscience. Or something.

I mean, I like reading Kieran Healy.. but does he honestly think that all these UI features, which MS is so slowly copying, were all originally developed by Apple? Or that the situation is never reversed? Has he never seen Steve Jobs get up at a mac expo and gush about a “new, innovative” feature of the new macs which someone like Microsoft has already been selling for 5+ years?

Is all I’m saying.

Interesting. You omit the option of MS actually coming up with something original on its own. Is there a reason for that?

For what it’s worth, the technically literate are perfectly willing to give MS its due, when that is deserved. There are some very nice low-level features in NT (for example the way a user can snapshot the filesystem), and of course NT is way more scalable than MacOS X. COM/DCOM/COM+ had some really nice ideas in it before it collapsed of its own weight, and .NET likewise has some very nice ideas.
The problem is, as people have said
(1) There are precious few UI features from MS that anyone else (technically literate or otherwise) thinks worthy of respect.
(2) MS, much more so than other companies, tries to pretend that everything they do is original when it is stunningly clearly not. This speech is an example, but it’s hardly alone. I remember a speech about MS Virtual Earth than went on for 45 minutes not once acknowledging the existence of Google Earth. This sort of denial borders on pathological.