Did the designers of Windows 7 draw inspiration from Mac OS X?

According to a Microsoft employee, the answer is "yes." That executive--Simon Aldous, Microsoft's partner group manager in the U.K.--told British tech-trade publication PCR that Windows 7 looked to Apple in modeling its end-user interface:

"One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it's very graphical and easy to use. What we've tried to do with Windows 7--whether it's traditional format or in a touch format--is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics."

The time-stamp on that article is Nov. 11, 9:53am GMT. If you heard a brief rumbling beneath your feet roughly five minutes later, that was the sound of Redmond officially going DEFCON-1.

Simon Aldous, I think it's safe to assume that you're no longer on Steve Ballmer's holiday-card list. In fact, I'd probably take care to avoid Ballmer, should you ever find yourself in a building with him in the near future; I hear he has a surprisingly accurate throwing arm.

The empire had no choice but to strike back. On The Windows Blog, normally avuncular spokesperson Brandon LeBlanc initiated the smackdown, insisting that Aldous was "a Microsoft employee who was not involved in any aspect of designing Windows 7" and that "his comments were inaccurate and uninformed."

If I were Microsoft, I'd actually be more irate over Aldous's other comments--which oddly enough, didn't light up the blogosphere like the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree--about how Windows 7 is "basically the next version of Vista."

Aldous added: "We've taken everything that's good about Vista, along with the core infrastructure of the operating system, and we've made it faster and slimmed down the code to make it more effective."

Part of Microsoft's larger strategy surrounding the Windows 7 launch has been to make a clear break between its new operating system and Vista, which never managed to really shake the bad reputation attached to its pre-Service Pack version. Microsoft's advertising--particularly with the "Windows 7 was my idea" campaign-- has been hammering home the line that Windows 7 was built from the ground-up by user input; the last thing that Redmond needs is the popular perception that the latest platform is essentially Vista Service Pack 3 (as some eWEEK and Microsoft Watch commenters like to insist). Or that it's a variant on Mac OS X, for that matter.

Now, the blogosphere will continue to twist itself into knots over the potential similarities/dissimilarities between Apple's and Microsoft's respective graphical user interfaces (GUIs). LeBlanc took care in his blog posting to link to articles such as this one from Fast Company, which deep-drilled into how Microsoft's designers came up with concepts such as the rejiggered task bar; if you take that particular piece at face value, they drew inspiration from "everything from Audi taillights to bioluminescent sea creatures to lava lamps." (Which actually sort of makes Microsoft's designers come off as the tech equivalent of The Dude in The Big Lebowski.)

Be that as it may, though, it's sort of hard to dispute the influence that Apple's emphasis on clean and elegant GUIs has on the industry as a whole. To say that Windows 7's designers didn't look at what Apple has been doing over the past few years is sort of ridiculous; but I don't think anyone could spend time with both Windows 7 and Mac OS X and declare the former a blatant plagiarism of the other.

What say you?