Both Microsoft and Apple are competing on the same front. That is, who can build the best searching feature. Earlier this week Apple demonstrated its progress while making fun of the arrival time of Microsoft"s Longhorn. The real winner will be who does it the best, not who gets it out the door first.
Microsoft and Apple Computer are searching for the same thing with their next operating systems: a better way to find stuff on an increasingly cluttered hard drive.
The software makers have made scouring for information a top priority. In large part, that"s because hard drives have continued to grow, stretching the limits of old ways of accessing information, such as looking through folders. "We"re filling those drives with a lot of contact information, calendar information, tons of e-mail and our photos, music and videos," Phil Schiller, a senior vice president at Apple, said in an interview. "Increasingly, it"s getting difficult to find the info we want and find in all these increasingly varied file formats."
Apple promises that Tiger, the next version of Mac OS X, will be able to track down information that can"t be found by hand using a search engine feature called "Spotlight." The technology, shown off at Apple"s developer conference this week, is planned for the first half of next year. Microsoft, too, is planning to make search tools a centerpiece of Longhorn, its next update of Windows, which is not expected to debut until 2006 at the earliest.