Microsoft innovates by copying Apple.
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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Microsoft was always a copycat company. They started with copying the BASIC on the PDP/11 they had at the school Bill Gates went to.
MS-DOS was copied directly from CP/M. Windows from MAC OS/ Xerox, Excel from Lotus123, MS-Word from Word Perfect, and Microsoft Access from Dbase, and visual studio was copied from Delphi.
X-Box from Playstation, Microsoft Phone from iPhone, but before that they also copied iPod to make the Zune player, and on and on it goes.
AFAIK every successful Microsoft product ever made was copied from something else. And almost always the Microsoft versions were inferior to the original. And Microsoft even sabotaged competitors using their monopoly power in OS.
I think I had Windows on phone before iPhone came out though.. Unless I'm misremembering
Microsoft made phones in competition with for instance Nokia and Blackberry AFAIK generally called Microsoft Phone/devices because the "Windows" they used had very little to do with desktop Windows. Microsoft iterated through different mobile OSes Windows CE, Windows mobile, pocket PC etc. made for different types of mobile devices like digital assistants and phones, and common among them was that they all sucked very very badly, and they were generally quickly canceled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile
those phones/gadgets were very different from iPhone, and later Microsoft copied the way way superior iPhone concept for the Windows Phone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone
Microsoft was so incompetent that when iPhone came out, Steve Blamer laughed about it not having a keyboard.
That symbolizes how stupidly out of touch Microsoft is as a developer of new technologies. They don't understand the use case until it's actually made popular by someone else.
What came first, Google TPU or Apple ARM?
Microsoft is reportedly in the process of bringing a second-generation Maia accelerator to market next year that will no doubt offer more competitive compute, memory, and interconnect performance.
But while we may see a change in the mix of GPUs to AI ASICs in Microsoft data centers moving forward, they're unlikely to replace Nvidia and AMD's chips entirely.
Over the past few years, Google and Amazon have deployed tens of thousands of their TPUs and Trainium accelerators. While these chips have helped them secure some high-profile customer wins, Anthropic for example, these chips are more often used to accelerate the company's own in-house workloads.
If Google's TPUs or Amazon's Trainium systems were as good as (and as flexible as) offerings from Nvidia/AMD, no one would be buying their enterprise GPUs.
There will be much hand rubbing in glee when this eventually fails. And it will.