Yesterday it appeared that some candidness leaked out from a Microsoft employee who said, "What we've tried to do with Windows 7 ... is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics." Microsoft blogger Brandon LeBlanc went into PR damage control, saying those comments were "inaccurate and uninformed."C'mon now, Brandon. Sure, we'll all accept that the Windows 7 design was well thought out and tested by Microsoft itself, and has some unique features. But are you going to try and convince the world that the designers of Windows 7 took a clean-room approach and spent more time looking at Windows 1.0 than Mac OS X? Why wouldn't they look at what makes the Mac so popular with its followers, particularly since Macs have been poaching market share from Windows over the past few years?

If you are not a Microsoft PR person and read the entire interview of Simon Aldous, I doubt you will find anything controversial about what was said. Yet Simon made one fatal error. There seems to be rule at Microsoft that whenever you mention the Mac in the same paragraph as Windows, you must emphasize that Macs are so inferior to Windows that it isn't even possible to compare them.

This Microsoft paranoia about anyone showing even the slightest amount of Mac Envy is a real shame, because Windows 7 is good -- really good. Vista may have updated some of the Windows plumbing, but Windows 7 has made the user interface changes that immediately improve productivity. The new taskbar alone is so sweet that it's hard to truly appreciate until you have to go back and suffer with Vista or XP. Microsoft should just say that they took at look at what the Mac does, and did it better.