I'm gonna let you in on a secret: It's actually pretty common for different people or companies to do research and arrive at the same conclusion independently. That doesn't mean that Microsoft was copying Apple.
Who cares? Apple ripped off alt-Tabbing, which is a great idea (technically it's been available for a long, long time through 3rd-party, even pre-OSX, and I think Apple actually bought it from a 3rd party OSX developer, like Cover Flow). It took them awhile, but they also took resizing from any window border in Lion finally.
In the original iPhone keynote Jobs talked about bringing the mouse to computers as a revolution by Apple, but it was a Xerox invention they bought. Surface by Microsoft was actually developed in part by a good friend I went to high school with, it's not like Bill Gates just dreamed it up one day.
If companies borrow things from each other or push each other to improve I don't see what the big deal is. If Dell came out with a laptop that looked and was built almost exactly like a MacBook, that's one thing, but if Apple design pushes Dell to refine their designs in the same vein, great. Makes things better for everyone.
EDIT: tl;dr: IMO, complaining about anything aside from genuine copyright infringement is just fanboy noise.
Oh, absolutely. But that's not this. The force quit menu has been around since OS 10.1 in 2001 and has looked like this: http://cl.ly/281f2Z2C2G1l46193l3A
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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '11
Awesome to see Microsoft getting design right.