Its crazy how members of mainstream media are such poor researchers. I'd like to point at Paul Thurrot as an example. Anyone who hangs around me knows I'm a big Apple fan and I'm not ashamed to say I can be somewhat biased toward Apple's products. In Thurrot's Leopard Preview article, Paul talks about how many of Apple's newest features to be included in Mac OS X Leopard are rip-offs of Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista.
 
On one level I could see where he's coming from. Apple is big on saying how they innovate, yet many of the features in Leopard have been done before. On the other hand, few companies are able to repackage hard to use features into a slick and user-friendly application like Apple can. So though I was, kind of on the fence about the stuff Steve Jobs showed off at the WWDC.
 
Then I read Paul Thurrot - The Best Defence Is Offence over at SmackFoo and WWDC Secrets Pault Thurrot Hopes You Miss over at Roughly Drafted. My eyes about Leopard's new features were opened like you wouldn't believe. Both authors demonstrated a clarity and understanding of the underlying featureset of both Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista like I haven't seen before. They brought to me a new appreciation for the elegance of Mac OS X's design that makes me proud to be a Mac owner.
 
Ok, enough with the review of both articles. The bottom line is that I now believe Steve Jobs and his colleagues onstage had every right to poke some fun at Microsoft. Microsoft's insistance that they not break backward compatibility is one of their biggest problems. This stupid idea of ensuring that old 16bit applications continue to run under Windows or that ActiveX not be scrapped in favor of something new altogether (.NET?) is dragging the company down.
 
I'm just glad I left the platform behind a few years ago.