[its_so_on]

#creative

I'm serious in kind, but not degree :) I do realize it's pretty frivolous, and a bit funny.

It's also a good minimal example!

Even though it is only meant to be used as a literal in a program to check against with a regex, still, someone has to write that regex. Someone will either write in "Success" or write in " -- i just flipped tabs, clicked a link, then flipped back to finish this sentence -- "Microsoft NCSI".

so, ha-ha, but a little serious. it's a good example that pervades every other creative choice made at the two companies.

[Aardwolf]

It looks nice until you look at the source of the Success page. All-caps HTML tags. Not good style!

[its_so_on]

I did notice that, and agree with you. The minimal example continues: Apple does not care about standards very much, in this case doing something (caps html) for arbitrary reasons and counter to best-practice (and the standard), while actually very nearly being the current standard. But nobody notices or has much of a chance to notice. I have a lot of trouble imagining Google doing the same thing on the source code - I can only imagine Google using lowercase letters in the source, as is standard and "right". This is what separates Google from Apple. (many, many examples of this.)

...meanwhile, microsoft doesn't come within a mile of a current standard - it uses a .txt file (backwards compatibility to, in this case, 1982.)