That's an aliasing bug in the data, though. The 2001 date was cherry picked to show the release of OS X, but not the switch from the Win9x codebase to XP. You could play a similar game with the summer of 1995, where windows was "innovating" rapidly with the sudden switch to a 32 bit operating system while Apple was mired in tiny feature additions to system 8/9.
The truth is that neither the XP/Vista/7 codebase nor OS X have changed much over the last decade. Desktop computing is pretty much a solved problem. Incremental improvement is all we're going to see from here on.
> Desktop computing is pretty much a solved problem. Incremental improvement is all we're going to see from here on.
I agree that we're just going to see incremental improvement with the current UI paradigms. Maybe this is just a sci-fi reverie, but I'd hope that at a certain point, we see a new generation of desktop UIs. (Centered around what, I don't know. Maybe 3D layout + 3D gesture recognition. Pan, tilt, zoom.)
The truth is that neither the XP/Vista/7 codebase nor OS X have changed much over the last decade. Desktop computing is pretty much a solved problem. Incremental improvement is all we're going to see from here on.