Apple fans give me gout.

First it was the banter about the Office12 demo that irked me a good deal. Now it’s all of the crybabies in Cupertino that have gone further and truly pissed me off with their babble about Widgets versus Gadgets, and their “errr! Microsoft copies Apple again!”

One word summary: Scoreboard.

I sorta figured there would be a bunch of pro-Apple statements floating around the digital world during the PDC. Sure, the new Glass-enabled demos of Vista would get some “yawn – look a Start button! ooooo!” from Apple. I sorta expected some excitement from them over Office 12’s new UI – after all, Office for Mac is well received for business users that want to run Apple’s in the workplace. I certainly never expected a backlash over Gadgets, given Apple’s history with Widgets.

Yet, the biggest “bronx cheer” that I’m reading in the blogsphere is “Oh, look! Microsoft copied Apple yet again!”. Hey, Apple fans? Where do you get the balls to say that? Need I remind you that you reamed one of your own ISV’s – Konfabulator, now owned by Yahoo! – when you introduced Dashboard? Isn’t it convenient that you’ve forgotten that whole PR debacle? You even used the same Widgets that Konfabulator used when you started leaking screenshots!

You’ve got hell of a lot of nerve pointing that “copied us!” finger at Microsoft, when it comes to this stuff.

Especially, look at the differences, according to the PDC demo… Vista currently has a docking bar for all of their Gadgets. You don’t have that. You can also take Gadgets off the Sidebar and leave them floating… the only way Dashboard can do that is with a tweak of a config setting – it’s not meant to do that, out of the box. And then there’s things like server-based Gadgets and the Sideshow Gadgets that Apple hasn’t even attempted nor probably dreamed about yet.

Copied us, says Apple… Yawn, I say.

Like you deserve such flattery for something like this… meh!