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1) A crude version of the new Alt-tab was avaible as a poertoy from MS quite a bit before Expose came out.

im not comparing alt-tab with thumbnails with expose. i thought that would be rather obvious. what im comparing with expose is the stacked windows thing.

2) Spotlight is a somewhat beta version of an OS-integrated Desktop search. There are a ton better ones floating around in Windows. I don't think Spotlight was even remotely first on this one.

the ones floating around windows dont compare to spotlight. spotlight is fully integrated into the os. what they havnt done yet is leveraged the db with finder, but that will come in upcomming versions. if you had used tiger, you wouldnt be comparing it to stuff like google desktop.

3) Of course the most silly one being gadgets being a ripoff from Dashboard. Two things (a) (if you actually followed the link) the support for auxillary screens is rather novel and I have never heard that from Apple. (b) Dashboard is a ripoff of Konfabulator which is a ripoff of DesktopX. So not sure what your point with that is.

my point, as i said before, is that microsoft doesnt innovate. that is one area that apple didnt either, and there were plenty of things before konfab too. i believe the first time i noticed that kind of functionality was desktopX for windows. what i am saying is that pretty much anything thats interesting and non drm related in vista didnt come from redmond, which is rather odd as microsoft has more resources then anyone else.

4) It is interesting after all that rant, you accept "office and vs impress you" but still don't admit to innovation.

so microsoft came up with the spreadsheet and the ide?

to be honest, you do see some innnovation in both those products. microsoft didnt come up with the idea for either of them, but they have come up with quick kickass features for them. but i was talking about vista, which is where this huge flood of news is directed.

All in all, many of your examples of innovation by other companies appear to be copies. Needless to say, I believe barring rare exceptions, most softwares are evolutionary and not revolutionary but that brings us to point of open source but we better not go there.

i was not providing examples of innovation, i was providing examples of existing products that have pretty much everything that is interesting in vista already. when a new mac os comes out, there are tons of features that are quite innovative. when a windows release comes out, they implement others innovation. apple is small potatoes compared to microsoft, and yet microsoft is offering virtually nothing new in their first os in five years. this doesnt make any sense to me, and it shouldnt make much sense to windows users either. what microsoft does with their os has very little real impact on me, but i was expecting a bit more from vista.

and there is plenty of opensource innovation, just not too terribly much on the ui side of things. yet. we'll see when the desktop environments have finally caught up with the competition.

Spotlight: Minus the OS integration (which is not possible for most third-party application with closed source OS), everything is better implemented in something like YDS. Not really sure how much of difference the OS level integration has made for Spotlight, except cosmetics like you get a toolbar in Finder and can find files you created a few minutes apart (the latter being a feature that I can't imagine when I will use). And I have used both and still do so extensively. Spotlight because the three Macs I take care of have nothing else to use. But it is nice to see that you even include features in future versions of Spotlight. That does make the comparison totally fair with something like the current version of YDS.

Dashboard: It's nice to see you come down from your original example and justification, you should go back read your previous posts.

Office & VB: MS did not invent spreadsheets and ide but it definitely has taken it a lot further than any other company. And there definitely is a lot of innovation in both products. If you want to continue denying that that's up to you.

I am not sure why you say Apple is small potatoes compared to MS, considering the hardware platforms and softwares MS carries with it, I think it is obvious that it will take more resources to make sure everything works unlike the single configuration supported by Apple. For instance, integrated search for Longhorn was presented at about the same time Apple said they will be doing the same. And the Sidebar was presented a lot before Apple said anything about Dashboard. But Apple happened to bring them out first.

Again, you mention tons of innovation with each Mac OS release and if you look beyond the advertisement blurb, most of these innovations are not really innovative. Plus are badly implemented. For instance, the version of Dashboard released originally with Tiger had a gaping hole which stayed open for more than two months after an exploit was publicly available.

Also, when a software comes after a big gap there obviously will be many features that it brings in which are already available in a some manner by smaller companies. These are not perfect products but they are "prior art". But at the same time when it is re-implemented there will be improvements. So when Apple copied DesktopX and Konfabulator, in your previous post, you talk about smaller memory footprint. So how do you know those kind of improvements won't happen with the Sidebar.