Microsoft employees claim Apple lifted ‘Spotlight’ idea straight out of early builds of Longhorn

21 years ago

“Microsoft’s MSN division on Monday launched its Toolbar and Windows Desktop Search product after five months of beta testing. The new toolbar promises to give a taste what search experience Longhorn is expected to bring. Noticeably missing from the final release, however, was a tabbed browsing feature that appeared in early betas,” Ed Oswald reports for BetaNews.

“Apple recently added a desktop search feature of its own within the latest version of its operating system, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Called Spotlight, the feature works much like MSN’s, which has caused some consternation internally within Microsoft,” Oswald reports. “Some within have claimed that Apple lifted the idea straight out of early builds of Longhorn. Apple, on the other hand, said publicly that the idea for Spotlight had been in the works for several years — long before any inklings of improved search capabilities within Windows came out of Redmond.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Spotlight works “much like” MSN’s? Not a chance, unless you also believe that Lebron James plays basketball much like your friend Joe down the street. And, by the way, Apple has had an integrated search system that indexed local hard drives, server volumes, and the internet itself since 1998 with Sherlock in Mac OS 8.5. More about Apple’s Sherlock here. More about Apple’s powerful new Spotlight technology here. If you’re not stuck on Windows (with its weak MSN search) and Internet Explorer, open the links in tabs for convenience. Isn’t is amazing how far ahead Apple was with Sherlock and that so few seem to remember that fact?

Apple’s new Spotlight, built-into Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger isn’t some bolted on hack like MSN and the other search programs out there for Windows. With Spotlight, when you make a change, such as adding a new file, receiving an email or entering a new contact, Spotlight updates its index automatically, so search results are always up-to-the-moment accurate. Changes don’t have to wait to be indexed in order to show up in search results correctly.

Microsoft’s losing their collective mind. Perhaps MS should spend less time trying and failing to rewrite history and more time actually trying to rewrite Windows to overcome its many failings?