Moral Equivalency

Dealbook (NYT) has a rundown of the stories that garnered the most attention in 2006. The last story was about a hypothetical merger between Microsoft & Apple:

DealBook said upfront that a merger was a “crazy-sounding notion” and “absurd on the face of it.” But, as with anything that contains both the words Apple and Microsoft, it could not help but draw some emotional commentary (“kill me now,” wrote “katemuse”). Much of it degenerated into the “Mac versus Windows” debate that has been raging since Steve Jobs of Apple lifted the idea for a graphical user interface from Xerox Parc and got more heated when Microsoft’s Bill Gates co-opted the idea from Mr. Jobs.

Nothing gets my goat more than lazy journalism. I know journalists shape (twist?) quotes and stories to fit a pre-determined theme. In the above case, the reporter equates a visit by Jobs to Xerox PARC with Microsoft reverse engineering Apple APIs that they were using for Word. Not the same is it? Andy Hertzfeld writes:

Microsoft’s main systems programmer assigned to the Mac project was Neil Konzen, a brilliant young Apple II hacker who grew up in their backyard in the suburbs of Seattle. Neil started working at Microsoft while he was still a high school student, and single-handedly implemented the system software for their hit Z80 card that allowed the Apple II to run CP/M software.

Neil loved Apple, so it was natural for Microsoft to assign him to their new, top-secret Macintosh project. He was responsible for integrating Microsoft’s byte-code based interpreted environment (which actually was a copy of a system used at Xerox that favored memory efficiency over execution speed, which was appropriate for the Mac’s limited memory) with the rapidly evolving Macintosh OS, so he quickly became Microsoft’s expert in the technical details of the Mac system.

By the middle of 1983, Microsoft was far enough along to show us working prototypes of their spreadsheet and business graphics programs, Multiplan and Chart (they were also working on a word processor, but they neglected to mention that, since it would compete with MacWrite). I would usually talk with Neil on the phone a couple of times a week. He would sometimes request a feature that I would implement for him, or perhaps complain about the way something was done. But most of the time I would answer his various questions about the intricacies of the still evolving API.

I gradually began to notice that Neil would often ask questions about implementation details that he didn’t really need to know about. In particular, he was really curious about how regions were represented and implemented, and would often detail his theories about them to me, hoping for confirmation.

Aside from intellectual curiosity, there was no reason to care about the system internals unless you were trying to implement your own version of it. I told Steve that I suspected that Microsoft was going to clone the Mac, but he wasn’t that worried because he didn’t think they were capable of doing a decent implementation, even with the Mac as an example.

In November 1983, we heard that Microsoft made a surprising announcement at Comdex, the industry’s premier trade show, held twice a year in Las Vegas. Microsoft announced a new, mouse-based system graphical user interface environment called Windows, competing directly with an earlier environment announced by Personal Software called “Vision”. They also announced a mouse-based option for Microsoft Word. When Steve Jobs found out about Windows, he went ballistic.

Apple visit to Xerox PARC and being inspired to develop a GUI from scratch != “lifting”. Microsoft stealing code from Apple API that they were developing Word with = not just “co-opting” but also “copying”.