Frankly, I don't really think Apple has behaved nearly as badly as MS, and we can't be sure that they actually borrowed anything from Watson despite the similarity - they might have started working on the new architecture well before the release of Watson.

It's probably fair to say that in this case each party has been inspired by the other. For instance, the name Watson itself was clearly derived from Sherlock, and it was Sherlock that introduced the channel idea many years ago.

In addition, a friendly competition is good for our beloved platform and all developers large or small, so Watson will survive if it's good enough. Apple is not in the business of wet nursing the week - they don't have that sort of resources. More importantly Apple is definitely not trying to drive any Mac developer out of business, quite the opposite - they are going out of their way to empower us with free and best-of-class programming tools, open sources, API documentation and examples, etc.

I have been programming on Windows and Unix (Sun Solaris, HP/UX, SGI Irix) for over a decade, and I can say without a shadow of doubt that nothing is remotely comparable to OS X for programmers, at any price. For instance, there are no tools on any platform that allow you build virtually functional apps with nearly zero user code other than Project Builder and Interface Builder, and you can program natively in industry standard languages like C/C++, Objective C/C++, Java. And of course, there are the usual OS X benefits too: lickable GUI, open and rock solid Unix core, vi, emacs, perl, python, ruby, bash, curl, tcl/tk, bash, apache, ..., all for free.

How much do the poor Windows programmer pay for Visual Studio.net? It's $1000 or $2500 for Professional or Enterprise Architect Edition, and $2799 per year for an MSDN Universal Subscription - all that money just for programming on an proprietary and inferior platform.