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 wou...