No Innovations in OSX?

First and foremost, I am by no means an Apple Fan-boy. In 2001 I was hoping that Linux would take over the world because I feel like the open-source concept can be beneficial for the users. Closed-source projects leave the users subject to companies that might decide to no longer develop the application. (Sidenote: All operating systems have flaws.)

Now, on to the reason I am writing this article that has nothing to do with the web.

I was on Facebook and a friend of mine openly asked, “Should I buy a Mac or a PC?” Someone responded and said this extremely odd comment: “Considering that Apple has made almost zero innovation to the Mac OS in 10 years, I would go with a Windows 8.”

If you haven’t noticed, Microsoft seems to be the one that is lacking innovations. My guess is that they don’t have to be innovative. When you have have 90% of the market share, who cares if anything is new, right? But, over the past 10 years I can think of many non-innovative products that Microsoft has developed:

1. The Zune – iPod rip off
2. Vista – not innovative, everyone hates it
3. Windows 7 – better than Vista, what is innovative?
4. Mobile Phone OS – no one uses it (a flop)
5. Surface – maybe it hasn’t flopped yet, but it will

I am not sure what is innovative about any of those products. Every single one of these was behind schedule (compared to the market). Vista was years behind when it was supposed to be released, and all of the cool features that were supposed to be in Vista were ripped out before it was released. The feature that I thought was going to be awesome was the new database driven file system but was eventually dropped just to make a deadline (and was never revived).

Now, back to why I think OSX has made some great innovations over the past ten years. Here is my list:

1. App Store in OS (copied by Microsoft)
2. Time Machine (copied by Microsoft)
3. iTunes (To say this isn’t innovative in OSX is insane; it changed the way we deal with music.)
4. iCloud (first OS with native cloud storage)
5. native PDF support
6. Indexing via Spotlight (copied by Microsoft)
7. Expose
8. Voice to Text integrated in OS
9. Bonjour (concepts copied by Microsoft)

Please comment and prove me wrong.

photo credit: R0014651.JPG via photopin (license)