02/08/2007, 2:30am, EST
Thursday, February 8th
Emails show MS experienced OS X Tiger envy
Allchin had reportedly just returned from the June 2004 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Apple during the conference posted Redmond banners touting its innovation and foreshadowing possible comparisons to the Microsoft's future products: the banners read "Redmond, we have a problem," and "This should keep Redmond busy" and included with a pictures of Apple's Mac OS X "Tiger" CD. Apple also took less subtle shots at Windows Vista at its developer conference last year.
The report also notes that Lenn Pryor, former director of Microsoft's platform evangelism, was impressed by Apple's integrated desktop search functions, now called Spotlight. Apple chief executive Steve Jobs highlighted the new feature at the developer conference and called it "amazing. "It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn-land today," he said, according to the report. Longhorn was the previous code-name for Windows Vista.
Allchin acknowledged that the company may not be able to match the performance of Apple's Spotlight desktop performance: "I don't believe we will have search this fast," he said in an emailed reply in late June. Apple developer conference was held just weeks before, from
Other Microsoft employees also realized that Apple's operating system was setting the bar against which Microsoft would be compared. Microsoft evangelist Vic Gundotra, who also attended the Mac OS X Tiger demo, was also impressed by other components of Apple's operating system, including video conferencing, Apple's desktop Dashboard with Web-based Widgets as well as other aspects of user interface rendering.
"The bits we deliver in [Microsoft's] September PDC [Professional Developers Conference] must be compelling, even in beta form," Gundotra wrote in his reply. "UI must be hot. We will be directly compared against [Mac OS X] Tiger." Gundotra, the report notes, recently left Microsoft to join Google after a year's sabbatical to abide by a non-compete clause.
Techweb notes that Microsoft released the first beta of Vista to a limited number of testers two months before the 2005 PDC event.
Earlier this year, documents exposed during the trial revealed Allchin comments preference for the Mac--in which he said he would buy a Mac if he didn't work for Microsoft--although he later claimed that it was simply a statement to help make his point.
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But i'm happy to say that having played around with Vista (under Boot Camp), i'm still happy to be primarily a OSX user (i use Windows for MMORPGs).
Everything in the OS is about Microsoft.
For instance, IE7 has only Windows Live search available by default in the search bar. You can add others (Google, for instance, you know, the search engine that almost EVERYONE ON THE PLANET USES!), but it is a multistep process that should NOT have to be made by the user - the average user will not know what to do.
The RSS Feeds gadget only displays Microsoft Feeds. I haven't found an easy way to add other feeds. Nice, eh?
Microsoft went out of their way to make their OS locked directly to their services, and used whatever dirty tricks they could think up to make it difficult to use the services of other companies.
Now I could believe 'Microsoft Evfallenangelists.' After all, they are about innovation and choice (and Apple's innovation is their choice.)
You may want to re-read your article and make edits to improve readability. There are repetitive use of words in one or two sentences, and in another sentence, you make it sound like Steve Jobs is saying something, when it fact it was someone else. There's also a missing closing quotation mark.
Maybe you're not the best person to be making comments on the quality of the author's writing.
In any case, the other grammar illiterates above didn't have any problems understanding the content, so maybe you should take your finger off of your monitor as you read or get your content from a news source that never prints typos, like CNN. Oh wait, I saw a typo there just yesterday . . .
Ease up.