The Macalope Weekly: Business 101

Macworld - Looks like there some people out there could use some schoolin’ on how to do business. A rather surprising admission from a Microsoft exec gets us kicked off this week but, as silly as Microsoft is, the App Store takes the cake yet again. And last, a well-reasoned, polite discussion about Apple’s strategy, featuring the Macalope and two knuckleheads.

Off-message

Does anyone know when Microsoft hands out bonuses? For the sake of Microsoft’s Simon Aldous, the Macalope hopes it’s not this week because it’d be a bad time to have “admitted we were just trying to copy the Mac when we made Windows 7” on your list of accomplishments for the year.

One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 - whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format - is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics.

Oops. The Macalope suspects Aldous’s Windows Mobile device was literally smoking from the flood of angry texts he got after that. Or, possibly, it was just smoking because Windows Mobile sucks.

Microsoft communication manager Brandon LeBlanc tried to walk Aldous’s comments back (tip o’ the antlers to Adrian Kingsley-Hughes) saying that he was both misquoted and wrong. Which is…interesting. You’d think, by the laws of logic that govern this universe, it could only be one or the other, but OK. LeBlanc stopped just shy of saying that it wasn’t even Aldous at all, but some kind of reptilian alien wearing his skin.

LeBlanc then set the record straight by saying no one at Microsoft has ever even seen these “Macs” everyone keeps talking about and that the Windows 7 was developed solely based on a dream a developer had in which the interface was unveiled to him by a host of angels and unicorns.

OK, the Macalope made that up. But, hey, if LeBlanc can invent a reality in which someone can be both misquoted and wrong…

Of course this kind of thing doesn’t happen at Apple. As any employee knows, Steve Jobs would be perfectly willing to set his vegetarianism aside for a minute so he could rip your heart out and devour its still-beating flesh in front of you if you screwed up this big.

Now, Aldous is not an engineer on the Windows 7 team. He’s a “partner group manager” which, if it sounds like someone who sets up weekends for swingers, is probably not too far off the mark. So who knows how many Don Draper drinks he had in him before he blurted this out? Even the horny one doesn’t think Microsoft is specifically trying to “create a Mac look and feel.”