Programming Windows: Redmond, Start Your Photocopiers (Premium)

In the years since Steve Jobs had returned to Apple, he had rarely missed an opportunity to mock Microsoft or Windows, and he often took on its much bigger competitor with a palpable sense of glee. But Microsoft’s Longhorn missteps triggered an escalation in Apple’s digs on Microsoft. And as the delays continued, so did Apple’s efforts to call out Microsoft’s incompetence and its relative agility.

In June 2004, Apple hosted its annual developer conference, WWDC, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. To put this date in perspective, Microsoft had released Windows XP in October 2001, but its next major follow-up, Longhorn, was still years away. Apple, meanwhile, had released Mac OS X Cheetah and Puma in 2001, and it had followed up those releases with Jaguar in 2002 and Panther in 2003.

Attendees were greeted with various Microsoft-mocking banners when they entered the Moscone Center at the start of the show. “Introducing Longhorn,” one read. “Redmond, start your photocopiers.” “This should keep Redmond busy.” And “Redmond, we have a problem.”

“Starting today, our focus is on the next release of Mac OS X, which is called Tiger,” Jobs said during his WWDC 2004 keynote. “Tiger is the 5th major release of Mac OS X. Tiger is going to ship in the first half of 2005.” As he said that, the onscreen slide behind him shifted to read “more than a year before Longhorn.”

“So we’re showing it to you a little earlier than we’ve shown you prior releases like Panther last year in the fall … We want to show you what our thinking is, and we wanted to get you [developers] started to incorporate some of the major new technologies you’re going to see today, in your apps.”

“With Mac OS X in general, we have leaped ahead of our competition,” he said as an image of the rear of a Porsche Boxster appeared behind him. “Apple is now, again, the innovator in personal computer operating systems. And everyone else is following our taillights. Other people are trying to madly copy Panther in the next release of their operating system. And we’re having a bit of fun with that. Outside in the lobby, you can see some of the posters on your way out. But we think Tiger is going to catapult us even further ahead. And drive the copycats a little bit crazy.”

Jobs then went on to describe the “over 150 new features” in Tiger, some of which he described as “just groundbreaking.” Not coincidentally, some of these groundbreaking new features would cause many sleepless nights for the hapless Longhorn engineers in Redmond, Washington, who had been toiling for years to bring similar functionality to Windows, albeit in far more ponderous ways.

Tiger, Jobs announced, would be the first 64-bit version of Mac OS X, and it would allow users to run 32-bit apps alongside 64-bit apps. (Microsoft’s first mainstream 64-bit version of Windows, Windows XP x64 Edition, wouldn’t ship until 2005.) It would include Windows interoperability improvements, like improved SMB performance when accessing Windows-based file shares on the network, and Kerberos and NTLMv2 authentication support. Tiger’s email application would even support HTML email composition for Hotmail, and its TextEdit rich text editor would create Microsoft Word-compatible tables.

But “the most revolutionary feature in Tiger,” as Jobs correctly noted, was one that cut right to the heart of Microsoft’s “holy grail” in Longhorn, the instant search capabilities it sought to bring via WinFS.
“We think we’re years ahead of Longhorn,” Jobs said. “The other guys have been talking about it. We’ve been doing it.”

In sharp contrast to Microsoft’s laborious explanations over the preview few years about databases and schemas, and the need for a single data store, Jobs explained the importance of search using plain English that anyone could understand. “Now, we have a zillion file folders and you can’t find anything,” he said. “It’s easier to find something from one of a billion websites on the web with Google than it is to find something on your hard disk.”

Apple, he said, had already solved this problem in iTunes: “You can find one song out of thousands or even tens of thousands in just a second,” he noted, “just by typing it into the search field in iTunes. Boom!”

What Apple did, he said, was apply this to the entire system. This new technology, called Spotlight, would let users query OS X to find documents and other files on their Macs, no matter where they were hiding. You could type queries like “Keynote presentations from Phil that I opened last week,” “WWDC planning documents,” “All CMYK images at 1200 dpi for a particular client,” and so on. It would be very fast, like iTunes, support all standard file and metadata formats, and was extensible. It would work will all current apps, and it would integrate with key OS X apps like the Finder (like Explorer in Windows), Address Book, Mail, and Settings.

To demonstrate Spotlight, Jobs used a Mac that had been preloaded with over 100,000 files. Selecting the search bar in a Finder window, he typed “pixar,” and—“Boom!”—48 files instantly appeared in the window. Most didn’t include the phrase “pixar” in their files names; instead, Spotlight had picked it up from the files’ metadata, which in many cases included the name Pixar in the copyright information. He then fine-tuned the search phrase to “pixar 2002” and—again, “Boom!”—the search results changed instantly to only show those files that met both criteria.

The Mac OS X Finder also provided simple filtering capabilities so that you could show only presentations, movies, or other types of files. And you could continue adding filers, fine-tuning the results ever further. Each time Jobs made a change, the results came back instantaneously.

The system could also save queries similarly to how iTunes saved smart playlists for its users. Saved queries would appear as Smart Folders—what Longhorn called virtual folders—which were really live views of the data and thus would change as the user made changes to the system, adding, modifying, or removing files that met that criteria. The audience exploded with applause.

Jobs then showed off Spotlight integration with other applications, but the bigger deal, perhaps, was that Spotlight wasn’t just for individual apps like Finder and Address Book, it was for the entire system. And so users could also search everything via a new icon—which resembled a magnifying glass—in the Mac OS X system menu. The results would appear in a drop-down window that segregated them by type, so you could see contacts, images, email messages, and other types of data in separate lists, instantly. If there were too many results, they could appear in a dedicated and fully customizable window with filtering and sorting capabilities. Again, the audience exploded with applause.

Everything about Spotlight was impressive, but Jobs continued to amaze the audience by demonstrating that the system also examined and indexed the content found in files. To show this off, he searched for Half Dome, the legendary granite dome in Yosemite Park, and selected a PDF-based map of Yosemite among the results. Spotlight had found this document because the words “Half Dome” were written in tiny text inside it. This was something you would never be able to find by hand, he said, but it was indexed by Spotlight automatically. This time, the audience exploded with sustained applause. Jobs had literally shown them the future.

The technical expertise that enabled this magic would be available to third-party developers, and Jobs ended this portion of the keynote by announcing that they would get a Spotlight SDK that very day.

There were other announcements that would immediately resonate in Redmond, because Microsoft would go on to basically copy them. There was RSS integration in Mac OS X and Safari, a feature Microsoft would later announce for Longhorn and Internet Explorer 7. A sync engine similar to the work Microsoft planned for Longhorn. And new widgets, small accessory apps that would appear on a dedicated screen called Dashboard; Microsoft had long planned to add gadgets to a Sidebar in Longhorn, but the final version of this technology would be web-based, just like the widgets in OS X.

“I don’t believe we will have search this fast,” Microsoft Windows lead Jim Allchin wrote in an internal email after WWDC.

“The bits we deliver in Sept. 05 PDC [Professional Developers Conference] must be compelling, even in beta form,” Microsoft evangelist Vic Gundotra replied. “UI must be hot. We will be directly compared against Tiger.”

History shows that Microsoft’s response to Tiger was perhaps literally hot. At WWDC 2006, Apple senior vice president Bertrand Serlet did his best Bond villain impersonation while detailing how Longhorn—by then renamed to Windows Vista—had outright copied Mac OS X. The problem, for Microsoft fans, was that Serlet was right: in the two years since WWDC 2004, Microsoft had gone to great lengths to copy Mac OS X features and UI in Windows Vista. It had, in effect, started its photocopiers.

This copying was painfully overt, from the UI that Microsoft used for RSS feeds in Internet Explorer 7 that was nearly identical to that in OS X’s Safari to the color scheme used by Windows Calendar; it was, of course, nearly identical to that in OS X’s iCal app.

But Serlet’s most pointed dig, perhaps, was for Vista’s new “orb” logo, which placed the familiar Windows flag inside of a clear, globular circle.

“Now, you may think that I made the logo by taking the standard Microsoft Windows logo and adding a nice Aqua button on top,” he said, referring to Mac OS X’s user interface. “No. That’s the official logo,” he said incredulously, to laughter.

“But you know,” he added, “underneath it all … it’s still Windows.” As he said this, the Aqua-like orb disappeared from the Windows Vista logo behind him, revealing the old Windows flag logo underneath, as the audience exploded in laughter and applause.

“If you can’t innovate, I guess you just imitate,” he concluded as an amusing photo of a fan Elvis impersonator appeared behind him.

“It’s never quite as good as the original,” he said. “Vista is still in the future for Windows customers. But for us, it’s features from our past. It’s features we’ve had in Tiger, in Panther, some since the beginning of Mac OS X. And we’ve already iterated several times on those features.”

Microsoft’s humiliation was complete.

All the software giant could do now was ship the results of several horrific years of software development, put Longhorn behind it, and hope for the best. But Apple wasn’t content to simply mock Windows. It was at that very moment preparing to unleash the asteroid that would kill the Windows dinosaur once and for all: just six months later, Apple would announce the iPhone.