Weekly Wrap-up. While there's a lot of noise about the UI challenge between Windows 7 vs Mac OS X some claim that Windows 7 needs a universal updater.

There is a lot of speculations around new OS's from Microsoft and Apple with the intentions to identify who invented what and what ideas has been stolen. The interest significantly grow after recent story "Apple versus Microsoft" published at InforWorld. The article marked the top 20 ideas that both houses have stolen from each other during years and provides slideshows on the stolen features.

Although, the emphasis has been given mostly on two new Windows 7's features - the task bar and Aero Peek it doesn't necessarily mean that Microsoft leads in the list of stolen ideas. For example, the co-called Mac Finders's sidebar, according to the article has been taken from Navigation pane in Windows XP. The conclusion is that the borrowing process has been going for a long time and will continue to go on. A long list of major features eventually became a part of the computing landscape and it would be useless to try to find the roots.

Much more important for both Apple and Microsoft nowadays and in the future is to keep innovation on the place, as users become mature and selective, and it might be a problem even for such a popular OS as a Windows, especially when new the rival Google's Chrome comes to the market.

Although, Google many times has been blamed for stealing ideas from Apple yet it has its unique approach for user-friendliness, which might play as a main trigger for further innovation.

Apart from large-scale OS's wars let's turn to more realistic issues. Last month Apple was widely criticized for pushing the iPhone configuration utility to Windows users who have the Apple updater installed as the software was utterly useless to the majority of computer users, most of whom don't even own iPhones. That occasion proves that there is no need to have individual updater applications for Windows, Java, Apple and others as the universal updater is exactly the solution that can manage all updates for all software. As a result Mac's, Wins and other users can configure their updates, permit or restrict some particular updates and decide when the updates are allowed to occur.

An universal updater would obligate software developers dealing with it to comply with policies governing how applications is to be used. It would would remove the frustration of tediously removing updaters from each applications as well as return some control back to the user, and keep all relevant applications up to date.

According to Michael Scalisi an IT manager, an universal updater can provide a great benefits to users making Windows more flexible platform.