Internal Microsoft e-mail messages from 2004 reveal that company evangelists and executives were awed by Apple's just-added desktop search and acknowledged that what they did in Windows Vista would be directly compared with Mac OS X.
The messages, which were filed as evidence in an Iowa state court trying a Microsoft antitrust case, were between several company evangelists and executives, including Jim Allchin, the head of Windows development efforts at the time. The Vista, then "Longhorn," evangelists had just returned from the June 2004 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.
Lenn Pryor, former director of Microsoft's platform evangelism, said Spotlight, the new Mac OS X 10.4 search tool that Apple chief executive Steve Jobs highlighted at the conference, was "amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn-land today." Pryor now works for Skype.
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