It must drive Microsoft nuts when they show off cool features of a pending product only to have another company, in this case Google, come along and produce the same thing in half the time with 1/100th of the footprint on your system. Remember the sidebar that is going to be in Windows Vista? Well take a look at what I just found, a beta of Google Desktop 2.0 with ‘sidebar’ mode. It’s a great little app, but can anyway say rip off!
Mind you if the tech industry is anything, it’s a bunch of copy cats. Apple spotlight copies Google’s desktop search and claims that they are better than Microsoft for it. Microsoft adds RSS and tabbed browsing to IE and claims to be an industry leader despite firefox and others having these very features for years. This list goes on, but really in the end I don’t care who came up with what.
What I really care is does all this stuff work together and does it work well? Often sadly the answer is no. But hey at least they are getting better and that is really all one could ask for, improvement.