Microsoft has a long history of copying ideas from elsewhere. I've been watching them for years, and have yet to see them come up with an inventive idea. Oh, wait, they have a visual effect for tooltips which has them "unfurl" from top-to-bottom, that's probably a true invention by Microsoft. Okay, they've had one minor original idea. In particular they seem fond of copying ideas from Apple -- in fact, its well understood that Windows was developed because Bill Gates saw the Mac and got scared and told his people he wanted something like that.