Microsoft green with Apple envy
Saturday, January 27th, 2007
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.
