If anyone here knew their PC history, they would be hard pressed to claim that Apple imitates. Apple invented the personal computer, and later bought the GUI from Xerox, with the mouse and all. And until recently Apple has even had success doing things entirely different. But just to silence those neigh sayers, and MS fanboys, Apple has been working on universality. In order to illuminate all the false rumors, that the MS community and longtime windows users perpetuate without really knowing, because they don't know, and haven't used.
Fact of the matter is, it's the same thing MS has always done, they just haven't been this blatant since about the late '80s. Now MS is plugging away at copying winning features, and pushing out more proprietarily incompatible Office software just like they used to.
They aren't just copying Aqua, they are copying Sun Microsystems "Project Looking Glass" as well.
As a matter of fact there are lots of ways they could be doing GUI. And they are choosing to closely mimic Apple and Sun. And the "Dock" and many other OSX features are carried over from NeXT, and BeOS. Which is the company Steve Jobs started while he wasn't at Apple, and then when he was asked to come back to Apple, Apple absorbed NeXT. That is where OSX came from. That is why scripts in Apple still cary the NS beginning. NeXT Step.
And just to add, allot of Win '95, '98, 'ME, GUI features were drawn from BeOS.
But like I said, if they had any imagination they could find millions of other ways to do GUI. They choose to compete with Apple, the only other real competition.
I don't really see how you can't see the precise similarities in the GUI. Yah, they updated it, it looks like the competitions now.
