Ten Years Ago Today Apple Lost OS "Look and Feel" Lawsuit against M$.

Today marks the 10-year anniversary of one of the ignominius turning points for Apple's market share in the personal computing market according to this article. Apple sued when Microsoft released Windows 3.0, it's blatant but really lousy ripoff of the Macintosh operating system's desktop metaphor. Windows 3.0 had a desktop, drop-down menus, folder icons of file directories and tiled windows that opened to show folder and file contents. It also used a mouse for naviation, albeit a two-button one. Hewlett Packard was also sued because it licensed M$'s Windows 3.0 and rebranded it with some modifications as "New Wave".

Apple claimed, among other things, that M$ violated a 1985 licensing agreement with Apple by releasing Windows with the same look and feel of the Mac OS. But on June 2, 1993, Judge Vaughn Walker decided in M$'s favor. Judge Walker's ruling opened the door for M$'s subsequent release of a much better but still DOS-based product, Windows 95, for the masses of inexpensive PC clones running on Intel CPUs. With regard to the market share of the Mac OS, the rest is history. The market "said" of Windows 95, it may be poor but its good enough at the cost.

We will never know if history would have treated the Mac OS and Apple differently if Apple had openly licensed the Mac OS from the beginning or at least during the two years head start it had after losing the lawsuit. But Apple earned most of its revenue as a hardware company, and still does, so a shift to being more software-based would have represented a bold risk even then. [Dana Baggett]