It seems every time a larger company incorporates a feature that a smaller company has that a bunch of people start screaming bloody murder.  Shrieks of "copying" and "stealing" come up.  What's the point?  Last year the folks who made Konfabulator made a be stink when Apple incorporated Dashboard into the OS.  I totally agreed with Konfabulator's developers that it was pretty lame on Apple's part but in the end, complaining just looks bad I think to most people.  The fact is, if you make something good, other people will want to make something similar. That's life.

And I say that with some experience...

Object Desktop in 1995/1997

This is a screenshot of Object Desktop taken in 1997.  Mind you the product originally was released in 1995 and was in public beta testing in 1994.  It had features that were quite new (Windows 3.1 was the OS in 1994).  It provided featurs such as a skinnable UI for the entire OS (what we call WindowBlinds today), treated .ZIP files as compressed folders, allowed users to package up desktops (Object Package), Had a big sidebar on the right side with virtual desktops, system info, a clock, etc.

So when Microsoft and other companies started treating ZIP files like compressed folders, we didn't make a peep of complaint even though we were the first to do it.  Why? Because we didn't think the idea was non-obvious. 

Similarly, even though (to our knowledge) no product or OS had ever done a sidebar quite like this (NeXTStep's dock is pretty dissimilar), we haven't made a peep about other sidebars and such when they came along.

Even in 2001, when Microsoft incorporated GUI skinning into the OS using the exact same mechanism as WindowBlinds (uxtheme.dll in Windows XP might as well be WindowBlinds LE or something) we didn't complain or make a huge uproar. 

When in 2003 Konfabulator came out with a program that essentially did a subset of features of what DesktopX had been doing for 3 years, we didn't accuse them of stealing their ideas from us.  The only thing we objected to was their claims that they had somehow invented the concept.  It should be noted that we never claimed to have invented the concept.  We were inspired by IBM's work on an OpenDoc based desktop back in 1996.

And when we learned that Microsoft was going to be doing gadgets some time ago, we could have made a huge stink about that too.  Gone to CNET and Wired and other media outlets and talked about how Microsoft was "stealing" from us.  But we didn't.

Why don't we? Because nobody likes a whiner.  And in our experience, each change brings a new opportunity. Software companies must endeavor to adapt and change to new circumstances.  The only metric that should be used in my mind is whether a change is good for users/customers or not. 

To be sure, it's annoying when users will say "Oh, Stardock's screwed." Or even more annoying when someone else gets credit for what we were doing first simply because they squeaked louder.  But the reality is, in the long-term, changes bring new opportunities.

For example, looking at that Object Desktop screenshot from 1997 (which has the same features as were present in 1995) you can see a proto-Sidebar, Compressed Folders, ObjectDock, widgets/gadgets, WindowFX, WindowBlinds.  But changes have spark new innovation.

Most people don't realize this but WindowBlinds didn't really take off until after Windows XP shipped.  When Microsoft embraced GUI skinning, it opened the door to far greater opportunities.  It legitimized what we were doing.   Similarly, we had long discovered that users were generally not willing to pay money to run someone else's widget, we had already begun to migrate towards stand-alone widgets (gadgets).  But for us, the challenge was, how do we spread the word about why they'd want to use gadgets? Voila, Microsoft comes in and is going to do much of that evangelizing for us.  People don't care how their little RSS reader is made.   Does anyone care what compiler we use to make TweakVista? No.  Will people care what program is used to create gadgets? No. They will only care about what the gadget does.

Object Desktop in 2000.

This pattern will keep repeating itself as long as we continue to make software that extends and enhances the operating system.  And those that bitch and moan the loudest about being copied from will probably continue to receive unfair credit for "innovation" over us. But in the long term, I think people are more comfortable dealing with companies that look challenges as potential opportunities rather than looking for pity.