Thursday, April 28, 2005

Q: What do you say when Apple says it's offering features in its new Tiger operating system that you won't have until next year in Longhorn?

Allchin: I think Apple is a very innovative company, first comment. I think they do a lot of good stuff. I do believe they became fixated on Longhorn after we did the PDC (an October 2003 conference where Microsoft initially showed Longhorn capabilities, including fast file searching).

It's actually fairly nice to see, because in this particular case I think they saw something that we were doing that was pretty cool. I think Steve (Jobs, Apple's CEO) would also say this thing about fast user switching, when he saw that in Windows XP, he said, ahh, that was pretty nice, and they ended up adding that. They did it in a nicer visual way than what we did but we put the concept in there first. I think Tiger is a very nice system, and I think what they're doing is very nice integrated search, and that's pretty much what we had shown at the PDC in 2003.

We've learned a little bit more that you have to slice and dice the data, and seeing visualizations of the data is really important. But frankly it's only one little piece of what's in Longhorn. ... We didn't show any of the security stuff, the safety stuff ... There is a question of how much we should show, so that they can try to copy again.

Q: Is that a concern?

Allchin: Oh, a little bit, a little bit.