Two and a half years ago Microsoft executives were privately green with envy over the features soon to be released in Mac OS 10.4 Tiger.
According to a report on UK web site PCPro 
, Microsoft’s envy was revealed in a series of emails, submitted as evidence in the Iowa antitrust lawsuit.
Mail.app and Spotlight particularly impressed Lenn Pryor, former Director of Platform Evangelism:
Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store. I did system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and … my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was fucking amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.
Top Microsoft executive Jim Allchin was also impressed: “I don’t believe we will have search this fast,” he wrote.
The most recent batch of emails are available as a PDF file online:
In a nice tribute to Apple, the emails also reveal that Microsoft’s top executives were so taken with Tiger that they refused to share their installation discs for fear they might never get them back.
Previous emails from Allchin in the same case told how he would buy a Mac if he didn’t work for Microsoft and that Microsoft’s attempts in 2003 to come up with an iPod rival were very, very depressing.
All of this and more is available on the Comes vs Microsoft lawsuit web site.
The emails date from 2003 (Allchin) and 2004. As of January 26, 2007 Vista is almost ready to fight Tiger. With Leopard coming soon, Microsoft will again lag a few years behind the latest OS technology.
This PDF contains one of the funniest email conversations that I’ve ever read. Ok, I admit it. I’m a mischievous person.
It’s also interesting to note that Microsoft employees might be pirating???
Quote: …”Microsoft’s top executives were so taken with Tiger that they refused to share their installation discs…” referring to Len Pryor’s e-mail statement: “You will have to take Vic’s disk … I am not giving mine up ;-)”
How quaint!!
Not only are Microsoft impressed by the software, Microsoft Norway recently demoed Windows Vista …on an iMac!
http://atvs.vg.no/player/index.php?id=7334
Read the PDF, seriously. Wow!
Do I read this correctly? MS compares spotligtht (an OS add-on) to WinFS (and OS building-block). Now, they dropped WinFS but included their own system-wide search.
Does this mean that, after the demo from Steve Jobs, they changed course on how to implement this feature? Replace an unfeasable technology by something that is just a copy-action?
You can not call this Microsoft technology then. I wouldn’t be supprised if they didn’t actually design and develop their own variant, but peeked at how Apple is doing it.
Pathetic for the company who wants “a computer on every desk and a computer in every home”. By now, the only thing left that is genuinly theirs must be the company name.
Good to read the panic in these mail, though. Go, go Apple!
Personally, I think Microsoft is still behind Tiger, even with the release of Vista.
Remember that Microsoft cut out two major sections of Vista to get it to ship– the “new communications infastructure” and the new filesystem, as well as key elements of the new UI.
OS X had already matched the comms architecture around 2003-2004. The OS X filesystem has set Spotlight up rather nicely. The UI can always improve, but come on–we’re already there, and have been for a damn long time. Can’t wait for the “top secret” features of Leopard!
Sharing Mac OS X Tiger installation disks.
Has someone called BSA to report on the executive offices at Microsoft yet?
And its good to see Microsoft respect Apple’s NDA, haha.
I’d never heard of Jim Allshin before, but reading his Wikipedia bio is quite enlightening. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Allchin]
“For a year, Bill Gates tried to recruit a reluctant Allchin to join Microsoft, finally persuading him in 1990 by telling him that whatever he created would reach a wider customer base through Microsoft than through anyone else.”
It’s a shame such a creative fellow as this has to report to the bean counting corporate suit- Ballmer. His frustration must be immense by now as his team aborted grandiose feature after feature promised from Vista only to end up with the DRM debacle upcoming.
Afraid they wouldn’t get the disks back?
Why, did they think they’d have to do a reinstall?
I’ve had to do two reinstalls since Jaguar, and that was because I was too lazy to figure out what startup conflict I had.