“Although Mac fanboys and Windows zealots don’t like to admit it, the fact is that both Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard contain features that originated in the other OS. Some features were stolen so long ago that they’ve become part of the computing landscape, and it’s difficult to remember who invented what,” John Rizzo reports for InfoWorld.
“Two of Windows 7′s most touted new features — the task bar and Aero Peek — are clearly based on Mac OS X’s Dock and Exposé,” Rizzo reports. “Apple’s copying of Windows is less recent, such as cloning the Windows address bar in 2007′s Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard as the path bar.”
“But the borrowing goes For example, the Mac Finder’s Sidebar of shortcuts to drives and so forth that debuted in 2003′s Mac OS X 10.3 Panther was ‘inspired’ by the appearance of the Navigation pane in Windows XP two years earlier,” Rizzo reports. “And Windows Vista’s previews in 2006 are derived from Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah’s preview feature from 2000.”
Rizzo reports, “The most egregious rip-offs are almost certainly Windows 7′s task bar and Aero Peek and Mac OS X’s Command-Tab and the Mac’s System Preferences.”
Full article, with the other top OS rip-offs, here.
MacDailyNews Take: Comparing the lists shows that the ideas, features, and concepts that Microsoft steals is much bigger than the minor tweaks Apple may or may not have appropriated from Windows (what about the various Linux UIs?) especially in light of the fact that, overall, the Windows UI itself is nothing more than an upside-down and backwards ugly copy of Apple’s Mac UI.
5 Day Most Commented