On the launch of Vista, Bill Gates was interviewed several times and was quizzed each time in part about how Vista appears to be similar to Mac OS X in many respects (so it seems Apple's positioning as the innovator is working).
I don't particularly care which is better (they're both amazingly advanced from where we were 20 years ago; and at the same time not nearly advanced enough - the file/folder metaphor is archaic - give me deeply integrating tagging and retrieval).
I do care about the truth and business people acting with integrity. Bill Gates was either badly briefed, ill prepared or just prepared to make a bunch of false statements to the media. Here's just one example:
Lies, Damned Lies, and Bill Gates
Friday, 2 February 2007
In his interview with Bill Gates in Newsweek, Steven Levy pointed out that many of the new features in Windows Vista are similar to features already in Mac OS X. Gates’s response:
I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so
publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new
security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security
guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come
out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally.
I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.
So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user
interface-wise.
This is fascinating. In Gates’s view, Microsoft came up with these features, Apple copied them, and Apple got them into their shipping product first because Microsoft was spending so much time improving Vista’s security. Uh-huh.
Gates’s claim about Mac OS X security is simply false. Flabbergastingly false.
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