When you press ALT on windows you will see that some characters on menu items are underlined. When you press alt and these letters you can open that menu. To indicate which character to act as that you put & before that.
Zero-data retention mode is the default for any user on a team or enterprise plan and can be enabled by any individual from their profile page.
With zero-data retention mode enabled, code data is not persisted at our servers or by any of our subprocessors. The code data is still visible to our servers in memory for the lifetime of the request, and may exist for a slightly longer period (on the order of minutes to hours) for prompt caching The code data submitted by zero-data retention mode users will never be trained on. Again, zero-data retention mode is on by default for teams and enterprise customers.
Same here. I provided an authentic US drivers license for their verification (which I normally wouldn't do) yet that didn't pass the verification, no reason given. Well, if they don't my money, fine, I'll do it elsewhere.
My 2024 goal was creating a website for me and hosting a copy of my newsletter there. I heard a lot of good things about Hetzner and choose them. Just right after signing up, even after I put a credit card with 3DS they immediately banned me. I wrote to support, they forwarded me to page. I uploaded my passport with my face. But my account is still banned. And worst thing is I’m 1 month late for my 2024 goal.
Try racknerd… they have various Black Friday/new year specials that rarely/never expire and the price can be as low as $25/year for a decent 2-cpu VPS. Not the same hardware as OVH, storage often limited, but still an interesting price point and service. Biggest limitations: no 2FA on the control panel and mounting an ISO requires talking to customer service… oh and no automated backups but they might have recently added snapshots.
I should add - keep your own backups. I can’t trust that a service this cheap will not lose my data somehow. It hasn’t yet, but with margins this thin I wonder if they’ll ever go out of business on me.
Often keys are stored in some sort of secure Key Vault. This is part of the infrastructure, e.g., Azure Key Vault. Or something like https://www.vaultproject.io/docs/secrets
Bear in mind that English not my main language so I can't possibly transfer what I think clearly. This is also the reason of why I don't comment regularly (like never).
HN is still my go to source of news about almost anything. Ukraine crisis, health tech, startups, computer history, new technologies... anything. Right now, I literally have hundreds (yes) tabs open to just read the comments.
But HN also made me learn something. It was first 3-4 years ago and I still see the same signals every month or at least at 2-3 months. It is: "even if you have %98 correlation between things you and other people like there can be some fundamental differences between you and them and if you dig these things you will just drift apart"
We have a lot in common. A lot of us believes on tried and tested technologies instead of latest SmthJS. We still advocate Firefox instead of Chrome to serve libre software. We think that the power and money is highly concentrated on a handful of people and the distribution is not fair (but not the "5 families are managing the world" shit). We want free flowing data. We want the soul of web 1.0 back. Etc..
But what's detail and what's fundamental is different per person and I think the things we agree on is the details. We are different in fundamentals. We have very different world views and we fundamentally want different things from life.
Ok, 2 paragraphs ago I said that I noticed these things 3-4 years ago and here is the samples I remember:
* It was first started with GDPR. I possibly can't find the comment but I literally read a comment saying: "These are the reasons why Europe can't have successful startups. For a 3-4 people startup there is no way to delete PII from db. There is too much foreign keys in db to do that. Also we have sharding, replication etc. This increases the costs for smaller startups".
MVP and "over engineering" are not binary terms. There must be a middle ground. But we can't agree on that because the middle ground changes based on our opinions. And in my opinion Privacy is not something you can gloss over for mvp or because you are a startup. For example can you save clear-text passwords just because you are startup? What about SSL? Even letsencrypt requires some work. Do you thing this is a "burden on startups"? What about people in Germany who wants their home to be blurred on maps software? If you can't satisfy their demands then maybe you are not in their market to sell your software. Just please stop pretending you are immune to the problems because you are not "big enough". What's the difference between the news from 2010s that Facebook employee reading old girlfriends private messages and your developer can do a select * from users where gender="female"?
* Contemning people who prefer a more work-life balanced work and a hand of government on "free market" is another thing bothers me. By the way I'm from Turkey and I don't have a horse in EU-US game but "oh, you make 60k in 1 year? what a loser", "EU don't have startups because they go home at 5pm", "They don't have startups because they don't do hackathons" or "They don't have startups because they have unions" is a just a very myopic way of looking at life.
The United States is the only country among the 38 member OECD nations that has not passed laws requiring businesses and corporations to offer paid maternity leave to their employees. Netherlands will send a nurse for 1 whole week to the home of the mother and they will even do the groceries so the mother can get at least a little sleep. I will just rest my case here. Oh sorry, I also think that no one in Germany gets bankrupt just because they call an ambulance.
* Why can't we have businesses? Just normal businesses without obsession over growth, being a unicorn, getting bought by FAANG or IPO? Why don't we have more pinboard, screenjar, nomadlist, simpleanalytics or lunchmoney? I learned all of this sites from HN and I'm pretty sure they are operating like normal businesses.
I can understand that after you become successful, someone or some company can approach you to buy you. But starting with that idea from day 1? I can't understand that. Linode got acquired, redis also, lastpass too. Why do I have to constantly follow the blog/news pages of the companies I work with so that my information does not fall into the hands of companies I do not want? Why can't you silicon valley guys can't just have an idea, execute that idea with a couple of developers, employ some accountant, hr manager etc and call it a day? Raise the prices yearly a little bir more than inflation and live a life? Maybe answer some customer mails yourself so thay can also feel a connection. Maybe just meet some of your customers? I can't understand the obsession with growth. That's the reason why our planet is in this situation. You can double your growth infinitely and keep a healthy relationship with anything.
But, I love you guys. I can say that in the last 10 years possibly %40 of the things I learned was from HN. I wish you a happy weekend.
There was an effort to componentize Windows. This was extremely hard to do, while the kernel itself had a very clean architecture, the layers on top - less so.
"Longhorn Basics" this was a list of fundamental stuff that every team had to either cover or explain why they didn't (Accesibility, I18N, security, etc.) this was a great way of making sure that these cross cutting concerns where handled consistently across an enormous team
Testing - it may be hard to see this from the outside, but the testing was off the hook. Hardcore static and dynamic analysis ran against everything
If you look at Vista as a hardware compatibility beta for 7, I think it was a resounding success. They pushed out an operating system with a new incompatible driver model, had to wait for driver manufacturers to catch up (giving the impression that Vista was the problem) and then by the time every driver was rewritten, 7 came off as a godsend. 7 wouldnt be 7 without the "disaster" before it. It also let them use home users as a giant testing base for enterprise customers.
and dont forget uac, which broke a ton of code that expected admin rights
Prior to Vista a lot of code was written on the assumption that the process would be run with administrator privileges. While this wasn't the original security model for windows NT, 16-bit windows, and windows 95 et al didn't have a security model as such, so code that had been written for those operating systems was particularly problematic.
It was definitely the case that a large number of windows users, possibly a majority, would have their user account be a member of the Administrators group.
UAC changed the way processes were started to use a lower privilege level by default, or popup a permissions dialog if higher permissions were needed (based on a manifest associated with the process)
In parallel the code samples on MSDN that showed how to detect if the current process had admin permissions was subtly incorrect, so programs that had been written to do the right thing depending on privilege level would fail unexpectedly on Vista
I don't think nitpicking, saying "this is just a slider, you can't patent it" or "ms copied all concepts from xerox and apple lisa" is rational in this situation. Because this patent is not about these subjects. Just look at the bigger picture: Corel copied Office suite apps almost pixel by pixel. I would be pretty angry after seeing this to screenshots:
DR-DOS was a clean-room reimplementation of MS-DOS. Linux is a reimplementation of unix. Fender guitars work remarkably like Gibson guitars. The steering mechanisms on Masdas are the same as Mercedes. Nothing wrong with it. If you don't allow people to copy interfaces - where does that end? Does that mean that APIs should be protected from being copied?
> If you don't allow people to copy interfaces - where does that end? Does that mean that APIs should be protected from being copied?
That is what I don't understand about people who argue that APIs should be copyrightable. It's like they don't see where the end is.
The reason competitors want to copy an API is because it's inherently necessary for compatibility. That need has nothing to do with how good the API is. It exists even if the API is terrible.
And APIs all chain together.
General Electric makes steam turbines. Your power company uses them to generate electricity. If GE (by analogy) controls the API then all power plants on the same grid have to use GE turbines. Your house connects to that grid, so you have to use a GE breaker panel in your house. It has its own API, so you also have to use all GE appliances.
If you want to charge your Macbook or iPhone at home then you had better hope that GE has a deal with Apple, and that they don't cancel it when GE enters the computing market. When they do you'll need a GE phone which will need a GE wireless carrier that will only serve GE websites. Now you can't buy anything from Amazon because you can't get there from here, you have to buy it from GE, and they only sell GE products. And so it goes.
> The reason competitors want to copy an API is because it's inherently necessary for compatibility. That need has nothing to do with how good the API is. It exists even if the API is terrible.
The other way to look at it is that people want to copy an API to extract value from a market or ecosystem someone else did the hard work of creating, without investing the resources into creating their own.
> The other way to look at it is that people want to copy an API to extract value from a market or ecosystem someone else did the hard work of creating, without investing the resources into creating their own.
And why is that supposed to be a problem? You would prefer the world where Apple needs GE's permission to sell an iPhone that can charge from a GE power outlet?
That depends a lot on our respective definitions of "ecosystem". You can expropriate a whole lot of value from all sorts of people by reframing part or all of their products as an "ecosystem" to which you're entitled access.
Can you provide some definition of "ecosystem" that would be problematic? I'm not proposing a law that says "you have a right to somebody else's ecosystem," I'm proposing that APIs not be copyrightable. You still have to provide your own implementation.
I feel like I'm arguing against the position that you should have to service your car at the dealership because otherwise the independent mechanic who does the work is somehow illicitly expropriating value from the OEM. How is it that that has come to be a right of the OEM?
I think it's more like creating a car by reverse engineering Ford's in order to tap into Ford's ecosystem of parts and mechanics. Though I don't know where the line is. I think with API's: you can copyright the header, but not the ABI. I.e. nothing prevents you from making an LLVM module that exposes the same interface as what the header compiles down to.
> I think it's more like creating a car by reverse engineering Ford's in order to tap into Ford's ecosystem of parts and mechanics.
So Ford makes the Mustang, I make after-market brake pads for the Mustang and therefore I have to use the same mounting interface as the Ford pads. I also make callipers and axles and so on; all the parts you need to repair your Mustang.
In theory if I really make all the parts then I can put them together and get a whole car with no OEM parts. But notice that nobody really does this. Because if you're capable of making the whole car yourself, you no longer care if the parts are compatible with Ford parts, you just become Toyota.
What you might see is people selling "whole cars" which are 75% Ford OEM parts and 25% something new and different, like the Shelby Mustang. But it's not clear how that should be something bad.
> I think with API's: you can copyright the header, but not the ABI. I.e. nothing prevents you from making an LLVM module that exposes the same interface as what the header compiles down to.
That's kind of weird. The header and the ABI aren't separable. You can decompile the ABI back into the header. Does it really make sense to be able to copyright something which is just a deterministic transformation of something you can't copyright?
Sure, there can be comments in a header, but they aren't actually part of the API. They're just documentation that the compiler happens to allow you to put in the same file.
I'm not sure I'm with you on type names though. If the application being linked against the API was compiled using a header with different type names then the application would have to be rewritten to use the other type names. It would break source code interoperability. (And you can infer the type names from the ABI given the source and binary of an application compiled using the original header, without actually having the header.)
The steering mechanisms on Masdas are the same as Mercedes.
That's an interesting point in more than one way. Forgive me if I'm stating the obvious but Mercedes is a high-end car manufacturer while Mazda chiefly serves cars to the middle-class and in the case of the Mazda 2 - this generation's People's Car. By aggressively protecting designs then only the rich (well, Mercedes isn't super high-end but it's an aspirational brand) can adopt new technologies, which means the markets for new technologies are tied to the speed at which wealth increases (that includes the rate at which adoption at the high-end subsidises the cost at the low-end). It stunts the speed at which we advance collectively.
It's a good illustration of the general point - progress is driven by how many independent eyeballs we can have looking at the problem. Any form of limiting access to knowledge or technology limits progress in that domain.
This is a very important point, because the original intent of copyrights and patents was not for corporations or people to get rich, but, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The entire purpose of copyright and patent is to promote progress. It has transformed into a capitalistic weapon that corporations use to muscle competition and slow progress.
The flaw in this line of thought is that patents don't limit access to knowledge or technology. Quite the opposite, in fact. What they do limit is commercializing of knowledge or technology without license.
Since this MS/Corel case touches aspects of patents, copyright, I was commenting on a broader issue of intellectual property rights. Though patents do limit access to technology in many aspects; for instance, if the patent-holder decides not to sell their product in particular part of the world but ruthlessly pursues legal actions against people doing something similar there, then a population may not get to experience (and observe, and study) the technology. Patents themselves, as implemented within a system, actually limit access to knowledge - a patent text was supposed to be able to explain the invention to people in the field; currently a typical description both is too vague to be educating and broad enough to scare people off touching a particular subfield, not to mention that just reading the patent itself may literally triple your liability in case when you're found infringing (justly or not).
> commercializing of knowledge or technology without license.
This pretty much fits the definition of "limiting access to knowledge/technology" directly. Free access and commercialization of knowledge / technology (with some exceptions, like nuclear weapons) are good for progress, good for consumers, good for humanity... but bad for the commercializers, hence they try to limit it.
> The flaw in this line of thought is that patents don't limit access to knowledge or technology. Quite the opposite, in fact. What they do limit is commercializing of knowledge or technology without license.
So they don't limit access to knowledge or technology, they just limit commercializing of knowledge or technology. Because technology that can't be commercialized (and therefore obtained or used) is what people want?
If someone has a patent on X then there is no competition for the production of X, so the patentee can charge higher prices, so fewer people will be able to afford X.
If someone has a patent on X then there is a greatly reduced incentive for anyone else to improve X, because the original patentee can prohibit you from selling your improvement unless you give them an arbitrarily large share of your profits.
>So they don't limit access to knowledge or technology, they just limit commercializing of knowledge or technology
"Without license."
> If someone has a patent on X then there is no competition for the production of X, so the patentee can charge higher prices, so fewer people will be able to afford X.
Right, because the hundreds of thousands of patents on various aspects of smartphones are consistently making them more and more expensive as time goes on.
> If someone has a patent on X then there is a greatly reduced incentive for anyone else to improve X, because the original patentee can prohibit you from selling your improvement unless you give them an arbitrarily large share of your profits.
Sure, they can ask for arbitrarily large shares of profits, but that's when you move to a lawsuit, where there are more concrete limits on what can be demanded as royalties. However, lawsuits are highly expensive and risky to both parties (even patent trolls risk having their patents invalidated), so there is a strong incentive to find a middle ground.
"Without license" is implied by "limit" -- that's the limitation.
> Right, because the hundreds of thousands of patents on various aspects of smartphones are consistently making them more and more expensive as time goes on.
Nobody said anything about "more and more expensive as time goes on." As soon as there is one necessary patent the seller can charge the monopoly price. Adding more patents doesn't change the monopoly price (though it does add transaction overhead that comes out of everyone's margins).
You can't claim that the monopoly price is not higher than the competitive price would be in the absence of patents.
> Sure, they can ask for arbitrarily large shares of profits, but that's when you move to a lawsuit, where there are more concrete limits on what can be demanded as royalties. However, lawsuits are highly expensive and risky to both parties (even patent trolls risk having their patents invalidated), so there is a strong incentive to find a middle ground.
The damages a court would award isn't a lower bound because the patentee can request an injunction that prevents you from selling the product until you pay them whatever they demand.
What are you even trying to argue anyway? That lawsuits and license fees don't cost money? That having to pay money isn't a disincentive to do something? That limiting competition doesn't increase prices?
> "Without license" is implied by "limit" -- that's the limitation.
Again, what is limited by the license is the commercialization, not access to the knowledge or the technology. These are completely different things. You can find out all about a patented technology, and even implement it for non-commercial (e.g. research) purposes. You simply can't attempt to make money off it without a license.
> As soon as there is one necessary patent the seller can charge the monopoly price. Adding more patents doesn't change the monopoly price (though it does add transaction overhead that comes out of everyone's margins).
The major flaw in this argument is that these thousands of patents are owned by many hundreds of entities. There is no monopoly". As a counter-point, all you need to look at is the sub-$50, contract-free smartphones available in the US.
> The damages a court would award isn't a lower bound because the patentee can request an injunction that prevents you from selling the product until you pay them whatever they demand.
1. Injunctions are not always available, are not automatic and you have to convince the ITC, a separate court, to give you one.
2. Injunctions have been very hard to get in the US since the eBay decision.
> What are you even trying to argue anyway? That lawsuits and license fees don't cost money? That having to pay money isn't a disincentive to do something? That limiting competition doesn't increase prices?
I'm arguing that all those concerns, while making sense in theory, are not necessarily supported by empirical evidence, especially given the vibrant smartphone industry despite being rife with patents and lawsuits. As such it is not clear if those are greater or less than the benefits provided by patents.
An electric guitar is a slab of wood, some pickups, some controls, some outputs, some strings, a neck, some frets, a head, some tuning pegs, and a couple of pegs for the strap.
But even with this small number of elements there are many differences between Gibson guitars and Fender guitars.
The obvious difference is the shape of the head. Gibsons tend to have a spade shaped head with three pegs each side. Fenders tend to have a scroll shaped head with all six pegs in a line.
The screen shots supplied in this thread are much harder to tell apart.
>An electric guitar is a slab of wood, some pickups, some controls, some outputs, some strings, a neck, some frets, a head, some tuning pegs, and a couple of pegs for the strap.
I think that's his point. The things you listed are the interface, and the differences lie in Gibson's and Fender's implementations of that specific interface.
There's a bunch of stuff to a spreadsheet, and the interface is how most users will access those features. When the interface is nearly identical it's a problem.
It's a bit more complicated here because Corel are apparently following MS instructions about how the interface should look.
You are totally right and i'm against patenting such obvious design choices like Apple's patent for "slide to unlock" and "glass with rounded corners". I'm not defending MS, just trying to explain the rationale behind this situation because the article is pretty shallow.
I didn't find them with a few quick searches, but it's highly likely that the early electric guitars had design patents attached to them (there's lots of guitars since that have had design patents issued).
The case could be made that Corel did this to make it easier for users who used one product to find things in the other. I use both macs and pcs and I still get confused because the command button is on the inner while ctrl on pcs is on the outer. You need cmd-w to close while you use ctrl-w on pcs to close. I really wish one would copy the other and make the exact same keyboard.
The layout in Excel is not special or better than other layouts. The point of patents is to protect ideas that are unique and improve. By enforcing patents on layouts which are not specifically improvements, you're really just trying to create an artificial moat that makes it harder for consumers to switch products or use more than one. That is bad for consumers and it hurts innovation.
The layout of Excel is a product of probably more spending on researching how people actually use a spreadsheet than everyone else has spent on the question combined. It's incredibly special.
And if we removed government-backed monopolies on these designs it would hurt the development of these things or what? Just pointing out that serious work could go into a design and still not be a good public-interest decision to let it be patented. Probably the restrictiveness hurts innovation more than it helps.
Indeed. The actual complaint that the EFF links to isn't because they copied their slider, it's that the entire interface as a whole has been copied and that they go as far as to call it the "Microsoft Word mode" in their documentation.
I would agree a patent for a slider is a little ridiculous, but this is quite a bit more than that.
It's blue, uses tabbed toolbars, and gel effects. None of those things are new (though Microsoft really, really wants to pretend it invented tabbed toolbars).
Yes, they look the same, and Corel is certainly making the same UI choices Microsoft did so their users coming from Microsoft platforms feel more familiar. Do we want to stop companies from doing that?
In its own ribbon guidelines, Microsoft encourages UI designers to use the same tab names, icons and icon locations that are already familiar to people. Their examples of "correct" designs are taken straight from MS Office.
Yes. We likely do want to stop companies from attempting to steal users by literally aping the interface from a more successful competitor that spent millions of dollars in UI/UX/HUI research to develop it (opinions on the Office Ribbon notwithstanding).
If you cut the title bar off the two screenshots in the previous post, I think most people would be at a loss to tell you which was actually Excel.
The point of UI/UX/HUI guidelines is to ensure consistency of applications' look&feel. Under detailed guidelines, two applications doing exactly the same thing should look exactly the same. If both Microsoft and Corel are aiming for an optimum spreadsheet, the UI of their applications should converge.
> The point of UI/UX/HUI guidelines is to ensure consistency of applications' look&feel.
That's not the focus of UX, at all. Consistency is not an end in itself, it's just a way to achieve predictability and, in consequence, ease-of-use. It's important but not that much (not everyone is an engineer or homo logicus - people do tolerate inconsistency, as incredible as it might seem). Maybe you're thinking this or focusing on UI implementation guidelines. UI/UX (I don't know what you mean by HUI) guidelines should be heuristics/rules of the thumb aimed at ensuring your digital product serves your users in their usage contexts. e.g. saying the button should be blue isn't that much relevant; however, saying "you need an explicit button to confirm a given kind of action" is.
> Under detailed guidelines, two applications doing exactly the same thing should look exactly the same.
I just quoted this to illustrate how wrongly you are conceiving UX: you're focusing only on the "thing" being done. But UX - even the most square definitions of usability such as ISO 9241 - cares about "who" does it and in which context. So, two applications doing the same thing may look radically different, if used by different people and/or in different contexts. I also think you focus too much on the "look" aspect.
Exactly. People seem to be suggesting that making it a shade of green instead of blue would make the problem disappear (although, isn't that based on the OS theme?) Or should Corel use a completely different icon for 'copy', for example?
> If both Microsoft and Corel are aiming for an optimum spreadsheet, the UI of their applications should converge.
This implies that UI design is constrained by a fixed, incontrovertible set of physical laws, leaving little room for creativity, which is obviously not true. Sure, there are a large number of guidelines and rules of thumb about what make for a "good" design, but even within those constraints the space of possibilities is infinite.
True, but notice that one of the most important rule in all UX design everywhere is consistency. This rule by itself is a strong attractor, dragging UI designs together. And while not directly constrained by explicit physical laws, UI space is constrained by mathematical rules of information theory, by our biology (in particular the limbs we have and the brain architecture we all have in common), by interaction media, by our culture, etc. The space of useful designs (as opposed to just pretty) is quite small. There is room for creativity, yes, but changing the shape of a scrollbar arrow button to avoid a lawsuit is not creativity, it's making things different for the sake of them being different. At best it doesn't make usability worse.
I don't see why we would want to do that, from the point of view of maximum consumer good. Companies will try to make good interfaces even knowing they will be copied.
I actually agree that Corel are being scummy here, but you can enforce look and feel without patenting sliders for zoom and tabbed toolbars.
An observation: Corel copied the awful bits (gloss and low contrast blue) as well as the good (organising the toolbars using tabs). If they had only copied the good stuff, they would have come up with the look of Microsoft Office 2010 and perhaps had a better commercial opportunity.
People seem to be missing the point that the patent isn't for 'sliders' but, as the article points out, that very specific design of slider. Not the functionality. TBH, I think it looks pretty horrible, so no great loss here.
Isn't the ribbon part of the widget-library included in the Windows APIs? If you use widgets from the same library it will obviously look the same.
Although this case is a bit extreme, the order of the buttons and everything is a carbon copy, if the title bar was removed i would have a hard time telling which one is Corel and which one is Excel, and I'm a daily Excel user.
MS Office is used as an example of the "right" way of doing UX on Windows. It includes button order, names, etc. Under these constraints all decently made spreadsheet programs should basically look the same. "Carbon-copy same" is improbable in practice, but "mostly same" is what's expected.
You too can build an app that copies excel with any of the major win forms tool suites. DevExpress, infragistics, telerik all even offer app control templates called "Office <year>". These basically are the office UI with some of the event handlers stubbed out. My point is that I don't think that MS cares if you rip off their UI and I bet they even encourage it. I think MS wants Windows / Office apps to look like Windows or office.
So I looked at the Corel Calc image thinking that was Excel that I was looking at. I think this is the point, they look so similar that to the untrained eye, someone can't tell it's not Office. This is crucial when promoting such a product making people think they are getting Office for $30.
I can never quite get my head around what constitutes a patent and what constitutes copyright infringement. To me this would fall under copyright infringement.
However, I do understand the patentable idea of workflow that makes the process of using a spreadsheet more efficient. This is generally as a result of research and development and as such, may be subject to what has been patented as a whole. The positioning of the elements are designed for optimal workflow which makes Office unique. Someone simply copying it without their own investment of research and development does give them an unfair competitive advantage (until they get sued and lose).
> I can never quite get my head around what constitutes a patent and what constitutes copyright infringement. To me this would fall under copyright infringement.
I think both those are the wrong thing if your concern is buyers getting confused. Trademarks are the way to address that: MS should have a distinctive, trademarked logo for Office, feature it in their advertising or the like, and aggressively pursue anyone else who uses the same logo in their products.
Yes, you're right. Trademark is definitely designed for that. Having said that though, I know you can trademark names and designs. But with designs, I guess it's confusing what constitutes a trademark infringement or just plain old copyright infringement.
This might look like a pixel-for-pixel copy for someone who isn't very familiar with Windows 7, but Jesus, I don’t see anything wrong here.
1. The general look and feel is the same. So? That’s just fitting into the platform, having a native look & feel.
2. The general spreadsheet UI wasn’t invested by Microsoft...
3. The icons here are not, in fact, pixel-for-pixel copies...
4. The "ribbon" or tabbed/dynamic interface at the top is also not pixel-for-pixel...
5. The whole UI paradigm is, as you mention, from Xerox/Apple; tabs, icons, buttons, scrollbars, cursors: it's all just another remix...
6. And lastly but most significantly, I think we can excuse an underdog for trying to make software that would be easily usable to people who are most used to the competing suite from an established monopoly vendor!
But on the other hand, if you're Microsoft, you've done the same thing so often that it's logical outsiders think you're extremely hypocritical when pulling stunts like this.
