Oh lordy, I hate getting in the middle of Mac v. Windows food fights. I am not a Mac user, so I can’t speak from a position of authority, and the religious nature of the debate brings out trolls on both sides. But I really have to step into this one.
Yesterday, Microsoft announced the introduction of Windows Gadgets. The Gadgets Blog explains what they are:
What are Gadgets? Gadgets are a new category of mini-application designed to provide information, useful lookup, or enhance an application or service on your Windows PC or the Web. Examples might include a weather gadget running on your desktop or on your homepage, an RSS Gadget that pulls in your favorite feeds, or an extension of a business application providing just-in-time status on the pulse of your business.
This, of course, inspired guffaws, chortles, and snorts of derision from Mac experts like Dori Smith, who point out that this stuff was old news when Mac Widgets appeared in 2004. In fact, this page from Apple’s site sounds awfully familiar:
Dashboard is home to widgets: mini-applications that let you perform common tasks and provide you with fast access to information. With a single click, Dashboard appears, complete with widgets that bring you a world of information — real-time weather, stock tickers, flight information and more — instantly. Dashboard disappears just as easily, so you can get back to what you were doing.
Of course, Konfabulator fans could point out that this stuff has been available on the Windows desktop for some time.
And I could point out that I was running SideKick widgets (or whatever they were called then) on my MS-DOS PC in, like, 1987.
Now, to be fair, there are some things about the Microsoft implementation of gadgets that are genuinely new. It’s a unified development platform, not just an add-on. You can write Web-based gadgets for Start.com, which apparently will then work in any modern browser through the miracles of DHTML and Ajax. And gadgets can also be written for auxiliary displays, which will allow these mini-programs to pop up alerts in a tiny window on the outside of a notebook, or perhaps on a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone that’s in range of a Windows Vista computer, or even over a network connection.
But still…
Microsoft, would it kill you to actually mention the source of some of these ideas? Wouldn’t it actually help people understand how this new thing is different if you acknowledged the similarities to other things that have been around for a while? I’m just sayin’.
(And by the way, Mike, pointing out the Windows Vista Sidebar was announced years ago and that Apple stole the idea is probably not the strongest argument you could make. You have to ship it before it counts.)
I will now duck as the inevitable food fight breaks out in the comments section. Please be nice.
Ed Bott 
Are these gadgets in fact all that different from the Google Desktop?
As far as I can tell, Ken, Google’s Desktop follows the same model as Konfabulator. You can write plug-ins for it and anyone who runs the associated application can then install those plug-ins. But you have to run that program to get access to the plug-ins. Microsoft is building Gadget support into the Sidebar in Windows Vista, just as Apple put Widgets into the Dashboard in OS X Tiger. Gadgets appear to go further in that the same development environment lets you write extensions that can be hosted in a Web browser and on auxiliary displays.
Heh. I wrote something similar, but was probably a little more sarcastic. I think too many people take “innovation” to mean something brand new, when in reality it could be a legacy technology with something new added to it. Take .NET for example. It looks very similar to Java (on the surface anyway) and the technology around it certainly isn’t ground breaking, but I would consider it innovative based solely on how it was implemented (“Java done right”).
http://krazyyak.com/blog/blog/archive/2005/09/14/1600.aspx
Two words: Active Desktop. Gadgets/Widgets are essentially Active Desktop components with a pretty face. Functionally/conceptually, they are the same.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/previous/gallery/default.mspx
“Mike, pointing out the Windows Vista Sidebar was announced years ago and that Apple stole the idea is probably not the strongest argument you could make. You have to ship it before it counts”
Totally agree. Wasn’t saying they stole it. Just saying Microsoft didn’t and there is hard proof of that (namely a published paper, which some could say is “shipping the idea”).
I think people tend to forget that windows 98 had the active desktop sidebar. That was prior to apple’s version and Konfabulator.