Another political thread? Nah back to the geek wars. Just came across this Windows Vista Beta: A lot like Mac OS X.
Well no, not really.
I'll deal with the whole Widget and Gadget thing first. Microsoft announced the sidebar before Apple copied Konfabulator, yes that is right they copied Konfabulator almost exactly. Microsoft's sidebar (which hosts the gadget platform) existed prior to Apple copying it, don't believe me go check out the early PDC videos.
The home directory, well that's nothing new for either Apple or Microsoft, it's been that way for decades with Unix - which Apple had to adopt as they can't afford to employ kernel architects anymore.
Here's a screenshot of the document structure from Windows XP:
Now this is Vista:
Sure they moved pictures and things out of documents and into the same directory that documents lies in. Wow some serious copying!
But this isn't really what the article is trying to get at, more on that later.
Calendar applications, the article implies that Microsoft is copying because they have the month on the left side of the window.... Hmmm well let's look at another Microsoft application, that pre-dates Mac OS X. It's called Outlook and it's used by hundreds of millions of people.
So who's copying who?
Search. We all know Apple had that first right? Wrong. Microsoft announced the search functions prior to Apple announcing their search functions. Windows XP was also the first client to have the indexed search on, sure it was provided by an add-on (because we can't go back in time and add things). So don't claim Apple invented that, or that Microsoft were copying. If anyone was copying it was Apple. Again see the PDC videos from like 3 years ago. A lot of things Microsoft announced then strangely got added in Mac OS 10.4.
The whole article sets up Windows Vista to look like Mac OS X. From not using glass (one of the key features) to using an old build with a grey theme. Which has been replaced by a more Windows-like blue theme.
For example using these screenshots:
Clearly attempting to outline the fact that Microsoft even copy Mac OS X's disgusting grey look.
This is what the basic theme actually looks like out of the box:
It's blue, not grey. Sure it was a recent change, but everyone knew the old theme was just a placeholder and yes there will be even more changes later on.
If anybody is copying anyone else, it sure isn't Microsoft who's doing the bulk of it.