Now on to the meat of this exploration: ask around and people would generally agree that on the scale of innovative companies, Apple is ahead of the curve – everyone wants to copy Apple's products. For one reason or another, Microsoft usually ends up lumped into the least innovative bracket, with detractors usually saying things along the lines of "Microsoft just wants to make money, they don't care about making their products better as long as they sell" usually along with some edgy variation of the brand - such as Micro$oft to somehow hammer home the fact that they [don't!] know what they're talking about.


First to make [insert product here]
One of the oft-cited examples that keeps getting dredged up is the "fact" that Bill Gates stole Windows from Apple after a meeting where Steve Jobs demonstrated the new Graphical User Interface that was to be rolled out on certain Apple products.

What gets left behind in that example is the small, tiny, detail that Apple stole the idea themselves. Granted, it was unlikely to ever receive mainstream success, a little research project at Xerox happened to be at the forefront of the innovation wave in this case – not only introducing the idea of windowed workspaces, but they also had a fully realized, working prototype of a WYSIWYG editor and the concept of Hyperlinks. Not to mention the common idea of graphical ways of interacting with 'high-tech' computers was already commonplace in pop-culture at the time (even if the "technicians" tapped away at their keyboards to manipulate the on-screen events – a gripe for another time perhaps). There were also ways of interacting with graphics in niche products at the time too – like touch-screen directories (ala Die Hard, for the fine dining film connoisseurs).

Basically, what we're left with, is a case of Iteration, not Innovation.