Windows Mail
December 10th, 2005, By Duncan Gough
How can you keep a straight face?
This video of the Windows Mail team talking about the upcoming version of Outlook Express for Longhorn ^^^Vista is astonishing.
In discussing the features of Outlook Express, now renamed Windows Mail, it’s not just the name which appears to be a direct lift from Apple’s email client, called Mail.
To support system wide search, apparently called Word Wheel in Vista, also known as Spotlight in OSX, Windows Mail no longer stores email in a .dbx file. Instead it stores every email in a separate file. Just as the mail client in OSX does.
Surprisingly enough, the sytem wide search in Vista uses a plugin system to parse the meta data from all files. This allows third parties to write their own filters that work with the plugin system so that Vista can parse files that it initially knows nothing about. Which, of course, bears a striking resemblance to the way that plugins for Spotlight OSX works.
Of course, there is a clear argument that Apple and Microsoft aren’t just copying each other but adding features to their respective operating systems that customers have been asking for. They’re both as bad as each other. What I find hard to take is how any developer at Microsoft can get excited about such blatant copying of an Apple product. If you’re clever enough to get a job there, you must see how far behind Microsoft have fallen. How can you keep a straight face?