I'm a little tired of all of the Microsoft bashing. Everyone copies from everyone else. Who cares if they admit it or not? If they are copying they should be copying from Compiz, not Apple.<p>"I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." -- Linus Torvalds
I didn't take the original guy's quote like that. He said, <i>is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics</i>. That doesn't mean they <i>copied</i> the mac, it means they tried to make the graphics really good -- like the mac.
This seems to be the relevant original quote:<p><i>One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it's very graphical and easy to use. What we've tried to do with Windows 7 whether it's traditional format or in a touch format is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. We've significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it's built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.<p>Interviewer: So you've taken the style of the Mac platform and built it on the more solid foundations of Vista?<p>We've taken everything that's good about Vista, along with the core infrastructure of the operating system, and we've made it faster and slimmed down the code to make it more effective.<p>We've also tried to listen to what customers want in terms of a much slicker user interface and the ability to engage with it far more intuitively. That's the product that we're delivering.</i><p>You would think that Redmond "talking to the press 101" would cover stuff like this.
Let's give some more credit to Microsoft. More than anyone else, they worked with 3D chip makers to ensure that we all have hardware capable of running the eye-candy we see in Windows 7, OS X, and Linux.<p>They were extremely late in releasing it to the public, so it looks like they copied other people, but from what I remember, they started working on it before everyone else did.