Microsoft exec: Tiger is just 'a peripheral to the iPod' | MacMinute News

The article can be read below. Basically, lots of posturing on both sides. History dictates that when people on the Evil Empire's payroll start jawing so much about how useless something else is, it simply shows how worried they are. The pattern has repeated many times with the same result; MS buys the problem, "innovates" its own product to squash the problem or it throws vast money at trying either of the previous only to fail and concede and embrace the problem. See Connectix, Netscape and Novell/Apple, respectively.

MS is pissed off that Jobs won't play nice in the sandbox and allow the iPod to support Windows Media formats. Hell, due to a hack that allowed windows users to sync the first generation iPods to a windows, Jobs and Apple were forced into early official adoption of the iPod on the Windows platform. If not for that hack, we may have still been locked out.

MS did the same jawing with Linux and Apache and failed on bot accounts. Attack Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger? That's just plain stupid. not to mention three revisions too late to bitch and moan. Longhorn is a pipe dream until it is actually released. If MS wants to make the world stand up and notice, try delivering stuff on time for a change.


Microsoft exec: Tiger is just 'a peripheral to the iPod'
April 25, 2005 - 01:13 EDT In an article noting the release of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and the lagging Longhorn Windows update, Newsweek's Steven Levy documents the back-and-forth between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Microsoft's Jim Allchin. "Microsoft has followed our taillights for a long time," Jobs said. "Maybe [in the '90s] we stopped innovating for a while, but now they've been copying OS X the same way they copied Mac." Allchin, Windows platform Vice President at Microsoft, admitted that tardiness is a problem, but said Longhorn is a much weightier project than Tiger, which he described as "a peripheral to the iPod." Allchin also said that some of Apple's ideas such as Dashboard were inspired by early demos of Longhorn. Jobs briskly replied: "We've been showing pieces of Tiger for 18 months," he said. "And you can be assured all these things have plenty of patent protection."