dataguy - 12:42 pm on Sep 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

It's been years, but as I remember it, Bill Gates stole the Graphical User Interface from Steve Jobs, and Steve Jobs stole the concept of the mouse from Xerox. Instead of Corporate espionage between Microsoft and Apple, it was more like zit-faced college kids trying to one-up each other. IBM and Xerox were just big corporations that didn't know what they had, so it was taken from them by people who knew what to do with it.

I do remember the mantra that Steve Jobs kept repeating: "A good artist copies, a great artist steals.", which apparently is a quote from the great artist Picasso himself. And they say that history repeats itself. Hmmmmm.

I think the spin has been that Microsoft and Apple have come up with good ideas on their own, which many people accept as fact. Truth is that if you dig a little, most of the new ideas you see from both camps were either bought or stolen from someone else. (or in Microsoft's case, bought, copied, and returned for a full refund.)