The guy in the picture above is named Bill Flora, and according to the caption accompanying his smiling face from this CNET article, Bill’s a key leader on the team that created the Metro interface that Microsoft will be using for all desktops, laptops and tablets running Windows 8.
Looks like a nice guy, right? Now take a look at Bill’s work desk, and notice that he is designing Windows 8 using exclusively Apple products, including an Apple Cinema Display, a MacBook Pro, an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard and what appears to be a Magic Mouse.
Good taste in hardware, Bill! Windows 8… good enough to be designed on a Mac. Hey, that should be Microsoft’s new tagline!
[Thanks for the tip, Paul!]
Update: Apparently Bill is no longer with Microsoft. Here’s hoping Apple snatched him up!
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
44 responses to “Windows 8: Made By Microsoft, Designed On A Mac [Image]”
haha
No wonder Apple shares go up, MS – down.
Balmer’s going to go crazy(er) over this one.
Macs are fundamentally well-designed when it comes to their hardware spec. (because OSX requires so much horsepower to look nice?) … You’d be surprised how nippily they run Boot Camped with Windows 7. ;-)
Wow you guys are kinda dense. Windows has been running on Mac ever since they moved to intel chipsets. Microsoft is a software company not really a hardware one and any of those Mac’s, actually all of them could have been running Windows. There’s also another article with the same picture out there stating that he left Windows 8 development. This could have been taken after.
Edit: Thought I’d add this link from the apple website.
http://store.apple.com/us/brow…
Never send a PC when a real computer is needed for the job.
Like he doesn’t know. :)
(has seen pictures of Windows presentations done on a Mac)
Surely he’s running Windows 7 x64 on this apple-box
Microsoft good choice..nothing beats a mac in quality and i dont think any one disagree with me after seeing that picture
Get over it pals, Apple VS Microsoft is no more. They’re living happily ever after, with the shared aim of destroying Google. The days of Thurrotian OMFG Apple put a fifth column inside Microsoft are over. And, OMFG THAT’S CLEARLY AN APPLE 5TH COLUMN INSIDE MICROSOFT. Sorry, couldn’t help with the automated reaction.
No way is that in Redmond and I suspect it’s not a Microsoft building anywhere else either.
Windows Mobile and the deal with Nokia are both definitely meant to compete against iOS and Android.
android was designed on a mac too
My Mac mini was one of the easiest windows machines I e ever set up 8)
Bill Gates said on a number of occasions that he liked Apple products and that many teams at Microsoft used Macs to design hardware and software. I think he even said at AllThingsD that at one point, Microsoft was Apple’s biggest single corporate customer.
Bill Flora left Microsoft in August of 2011 to found a company called TECTONIC. When was this photo taken?
Sorry, but Win 7 needs just as much hardware as OS X to not run like crap. What you really mean is that Apple doesn’t allow their OS to run on hardware that can’t handle it and Microsoft does.
John Brownlee doesn’t let details like that (or facts in general) get in the way of a misleading headline….. Its all about page views.
John it would be nice if credited the photo and change the headline…
Credit: Jay Greene/CNET taken on 02/02/12 after Bill Flora was employed by MS
So Brownlee’s headline isn’t misleading, it’s an outright lie.
This is an irrelevant & pointless post. Who cares what computer he uses? There’s simply no context here. Oh dear Britney drank a coke.
My 7th grader does more thorough research than JB.
Too late
you can tell that guy was like “Mac’s are PC’s too, any way I’ve got windows 7 on there”
The people at Cult of Mac must feel so proud of themselves!
Apparently replaced by a former Nokia employee…
http://www.linkedin.com/profil…
Not really surprising. I can’t remember who it was but I remember an MS executive (maybe it was Balmer) flat out admitting that they were inspired by OS X only to get the beat down by MS brass.
I also like it when Google has a trade-show/seminar/whatever and all you see are glowing Apple logos lining the tables. Even the press shots of Chrome and search screens are usually done using a Mac.
He probably got fired because of too many heated debates over which OS is better
Well of course, you design on a Mac. Simple as that.
1. That photo is NOT taken on Redmond Campus
2. I didn’t see a single Mac (not even a MacBook Air) in my time at Redmond
3. That photo is obviously taken from his new office, in his new company (he no longer works at MS)
4. This story is a setup and most of you fell for it :)
So… metro was horrible but now it’s a great UI, right? BTW, Microsoft is a SOFTWARE company, which means Windows can run on a bunch of hardware, including Macs.
The name Tectonic is reflecting in the Screen if you zoom in…
Enhance!
okay
So what, in my company all the development team use macs to create web and windows apps, with parallels you barley feel the difference and there in nothing on windows machines like gestures on Mac, makes you probably 20% more efficient.
And as they say, once you go mac, you never go back…
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Juvenile article pointing to juvenile minds… you and Gizmodo should both be ashamed. This guy is a UX designer who took all of his 19 years of experience at Microsoft to start his own thing. I’m guessing this photo is taken in his “new” office. It’s certainly not anywhere on the Redmond campus or at any of the Seattle-area offices that I’m familiar with. In spite of Ballmer’s well-known public tantrums over all things Apple, MS has a very open culture about technology in all its forms, and I’ve seen iPhones, Macs, Android, you name it, in the hands of MS employees. It doesn’t weaken Microsoft as a company, it empowers them. Rather than the hush-hush cult-like atmosphere at Apple, Microsoft employees are actually empowered and encouraged to experiment, be open, and be adults. They get to make their own choices and bring that richness of experience to their work. Imagine that. I know this article is a troll, but sometimes I just gotta bite. It’s always the die-hard Mac fans pointing out that MS people use Mac… gasp! Ever wonder why MS employees never say the same about Mac employees? Because they don’t have to. No one gives a flying f***.
I’ve built Hackintoshes myself (as have some of my friends) with equivalent horsepower to the top-of-the-range Mac Pros … for less than half of the price of buying a Foxconn-built, officially sanctioned Mac. They run everything natively, no problems with drivers (as the Intel chipsets and common hardware just… work) and we’ve all made huge savings. Install a copy of Lion, you’re off and running!
You can even buy pre-made top of the range Hackintoshes which are installed into old gutted out Mac Pro aluminium chassis from eBay for ridiculously cheap prices. I feel no obligation to buy Apple hardware, these days it’s trivial to install OSX on any combination of compatible hardware. :)
So the first thing he does is go buy a Mac? Hummmmm
More efficient because the gestures? LOL your funny.
I’ve built
That’s where I stopped reading.
1. What you built doesn’t matter, since the mainstream products people buy in the store weren’t built by you (or some other hobbyist).
2. Various hackintoshes have various problems and are not comparable in any way to a Mac. A simple Google search shows this to be true.
http://goo.gl/hJwAo
3. What you’re basically saying is that you built a PC that could run OS X, though nowhere near as well and with none of the features of a Mac. Congrats! Dumbass.
Oh my God! Someone please arrest him.
I want to shout “GO MAC!”, but why? I’ve designed business cards and logos for clients in the dirt before my iPad2. The BEST OS is the one used in the movie Independence Day with Will Smith. It could talk in alien computer language.
It’s not really a “setup” when we don’t have any way of verifying the information in it. It’s more of a con. You know, a lie.