Recently I decided I would watched some of my Apple podcasts that I have collected over the years. These podcasts are mostly product announcements, and financial reports, etc. The other day I was watching Apple's WWDC from 2006 and Bertrand Serlet (Former Senior Vice President of Software Engineering for Apple) made several comments on the upcoming operating system that Microsoft was working on (Windows Vista of course) stating that Windows Vista had several similarities.

I decided to research Bertrand Serlet on Google and I discovered that he said Windows 7 was another copy of Mac OS X Snow Leopard - however that is not what I'm here to discuss. Bertrand stated that Microsoft's AERO theme was ALSO copied from a past idea that Apple had. This theme was Aqua.

Now, I use both a Mac and a PC I've been using a for a long time now and I've been using a Mac for at least 4 years and I don't think they are anything alike.

What do you guys think? Do you feel Microsoft's AERO interface is just a rip off of Apple's Aqua? I personally don't think it is seeing how Microsoft's AERO inspiration came from glass and Apple's AQUA came from water.

Thoughts?

Aero was inspired by water, however that would obviously be too close to OSX, so they decided on "glass".

I watched one presentation by Bertrand and thought it was humorous, but I don't feel the similarities are as great as he made out. Sure, both have transparency, and a search menu, but the feel itself is quite different (to me at any rate). Windows Explorer and the Finder are differ substantially. I actually like the look of Window 7 a lot, but I still prefer OS X overall. Aqua was a big change from Platinum, but the look of OS X has evolved gradually since. Microsoft seems to make big changes in the interface more often, I think as much to make it appear new as anything.

I watched that video. I don't know whether Microsoft deliberately followed Apple's design but I think transparency is a very common feature in modern OSs' UI as transparency is so elegant and it requires a lot of horse power to be shown. In 2000 Macworld SF, Steve Jobs showed the Aqua user interface and he spent a lot of time showing the transparency feature of the Quartz engine. Thanks to the advancement of GPUs, transparency can be implemented in any computer very easily and this fact is reflected in the UIs. Both Aqua and Aero are elegant and I love both of them.

I like the Aqua, but I LOVED Aero. I know the only similarity is the transparent dock and transparent Apple menu. I watched the video on Vista ripping of Leopard, and 7 ripping off Snow, but using Mac and PC, I don't think it's the same.

MS always was ripping off Apple (and still does)
you can see this clearly in Longhorn concept videos

You can pretty much find that every company in every business rips off each other, for example google yahoo bing and ask all took ideas from one another. It's not a coincidence that once you know one OS well that you can operate any of the hundreds there are, good ideas that can spread do no matter who or what body is involved.

sure
but that just shows how shallow MS is
and what is worse they still don't try to make something special of their own

(yes yes they could with LH, but now thats ages ago wasted chance)

It shows how shallow businesses are, not just one company.


That being said I see many times the differences in each UI than I do similarities, and (having looked at this many times in the past) I think any "stealing" of ideas between the 2 happen about as often and are actually being stolen from some other party a good amount of the time.

Aqua on OSX DR3 was a nice surprise.
Just delete the theme file and it looks similar to Rhapsody.

Microsoft may have stolen the idea of transparency from Apple, but combining all the good stuff is obviously the best. Windows was almost a copy from Mac OS too, parts of it, in the good ol' days.
So much is copied around, think of the ribbon for example. Opera started it, Microsoft adapted it, Firefox adapted it.
The Windows 7 superbar is almost as close to Apple's dock as possible. Transparency. All running instances of same program is grouped. Label only when hovering.
I would say that the biggest difference I would ever find though would be the system tray. Linux is using it a little bit. Apple doesn't really use it, you can just put icons up there if you find it useful - Windows is using it to it's full extent.

I believe the Aero theme is a little rip-off of aqua, but on a pretty low basis. As long as you can distinguish the OS'es from one another, I'm okay with it

hi newbie,GEM was a portable coded copy of LISA/MacOS,not Windows.
Apple copied the GUI concepts after a visit to Xerox.