My recent video, which tweaked Microsoft for crowing about its “innovation” in Windows Vista (without acknowledging its huge debt to Mac OS X), triggered plenty of reaction. It probably comes as no surprise that your comments quickly devolved into “which is better” bickering, which will proably never end.

Some of you claim, with much anger and swearing, that Apple steals from Microsoft just as much as the other way.

My response to one such response: “You’re right–very few things were actually invented wholesale by Apple. The mouse, menus, overlapping windows, the CD drive, Wi-Fi wireless, and so on–all of these things were developed elsewhere.

“But Apple *standardized* them. Chose them, recognized their potential, perfected them, made them over in its own way, and brought them to the masses.

“In Vista, on the other hand, Microsoft did not select unrecognized features, did not have any particular vision in knowing what would work and what wouldn’t, did not put its own stamp on anything. It simply waited for Apple to recognize and perfect good technologies, then duplicated them bit for bit. Oh, and then claim to be a leader in innovation. That’s quite a difference!”

Then this e-mail message, which arrived today from a guy who says he worked as a Microsoft temp employee from 2003 to 2004. I’ve agreed not to publish his name.

“Dear David: In your article on December 14, 2006, you stated: ‘You get the feeling that Microsoft’s managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, ‘Copy that.’

“[When I worked at Microsoft,] I was given a badge that allowed me entry to all but a few of the Microsoft buildings. One of the things that caught my eye was a large grid on the wall of a hallway in the building that housed the engineers that worked on Windows Media Player—building 50, on the 2nd or 3rd floor.

“The grid was labeled across the top with A, B, C, etc., and down the left with 1,2,3, like a game of Battleship. The grid was made of 8.5×11-inch pages, landscape orientation, showing color screenshots from Apple’s iTunes software. Each sheet was a different screen of the application: each tab of a preference panel, each info window, everything.

“Around the corner was another grid, showing the RealPlayer application. This grid was the same: grid A1 was the front user view of the application, mirroring what was on the iTunes wall/grid.

“Around the next corner was *another* grid, this one showing Windows Media Player version 9 !! This one was missing a few tiles in the grid, but you could actually see the progress as each feature [of iTunes and RealPlayer] was copied, square for square.

“Amazing. New software is put out, a manager sees it and decides that the creative part of their day is making color screen captures of the software and presenting it to the copying—er, engineering team.”

I doubt you’ll have any reactions to THIS (evil grin), but thought I’d share it with you just the same. Could it be legit? Or are we being put on by yet another fanner of the flames?