Redmond, Start Your Photocopiers

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The most hilarious quote from Apple yet: "Redmond, Start Your Photocopiers" but is there truth behind that? Lets take a look...

Spotlight
The wonderful spotlight tool, in the upper-right of the Mac desktop...
The copied "windows search" tool in the lower-left corner, built into the "start" menu...
Spotlight = COPIED (yes? yes, good)

Although one thing Redmond's photocopier missed was the fact that spotlight does my Maths homework for me... lol

Calendar
The wonderful iCal, pretty nice right?
The glassy Windows Calender (might as well call it wCal), almost an exact copy of iCal, but they messed up the colour scheme... lol
Saying that, is iCal not just a copy of Outlook Calender? Which came first? I haven't got a clue...

Widgets/Gadgets
No idea what Apple call theirs, but MS made quite a good copy in Vista and an even better one in 7, what will 8 bring?

Movie
So Apple has iMovie, the MS users have "Movie Maker" since XP, and it keeps getting more and more like iMovie on every single release.

DVD
iDVD, and that tool that Redmond made that is more like a rubbish copy of Nero. Although I personally prefer MS's one to Apple's one.

And I cannot think of any more, so enlighten us people!

And now I shall listen to some tracks on my Zune, oh wait, I have an iPod like everyone else in the world... lol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC ... n_by_Apple

You do realize that the US Federal Government (Department of Justice) is required to approve any new features put into Windows, right? If you're complaining that Microsoft is copying rather than innovating, perhaps you should complain to the DOJ. They limit what innovation Microsoft can actually put into their OS (or ship with it). It's far easier for Microsoft to justify a new feature in Windows because a competitor already has it.

There really isn't much originallity in your list of apps. A calendar? A search feature? DVD player? Aren't these pretty much required apps for a modern OS?

Yes, they are features that most modern features an OS has, but its just odd at how much they resemble Apple's versions.

Linux doesn't even look like a copy of Mac and they are both UNIX.

It's actually quite interesting the history behind who copied who. Bill Gates wrote some of the software on for early Mac's so their history goes back a long time. As an earlier post mentions the graphical OS systems be that windows or mac originated at Xerox PARC. Bill Gates was once quoted as saying to Jobs in a dispute over copyright "Come on Steve we both got the idea from Xerox".

Apple are innovative but it was Microsoft more than any other company made computers affordable to the public. I have a Mac and love it, but my first computer was a pc because that's what I could afford. Today Apple have transformed themselves to probably the leading computer company in the world. Bill Gates meanwhile has raised a war-chest of $250 Billion Dollars to fight poverty and save the world from mosquito's. Whats for sure is both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are legends in their own life times. Love them or Loathe them, I have a feeling we'll all miss them when their gone.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-2C2gb6ws8[/youtube]

Windows 7's desktop is a ripoff of KDE 4.

There are really only so many sensible ways to lay out a calendar application.

The idea that MS is just ripping off Apple is pretty dumb. Windows NT is a completely different underlying system than Apple Darwin. Even if they are implementing similar features, it's because things like a calendar, mail app, and search function are just obvious things that should be in any OS, and they haven't been copying Apple's designs.

Incidentally, where has Apple been getting all of its "innovative" ideas? The underling Darwin system is plagiarized from parts of FreeBSD and NetBSD. Safari started out life as a ripoff of Konquerer. OS X includes a pretty good pile of software from the GNU project that Jobs decided to steal from Stallman. Their chess program uses an outdated version of an open-source engine called Sjeng that they played no part in developing, and the pretty little GUI they made around it actually severely limits its capabilities. Seriously, what kind of program is able to write a file that it can't read?

Apple: ripping off other people's ideas (and even verbatim code) since 1983.

Other way around, I think. KDE4 was a hideous Vista clone, and once 7 came out with Aero Snap the KDE developers rushed to implement the exact same features in KDE4.4.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU[/youtube]

“We’ve Always Been Shameless About Stealing Great Ideas” –Steve Jobs

lol, well it is true that MS and Apple (It took a lot of imagination for that name, not!) keep stealing ideas from people.