Poetry is Microsoft

Has Microsoft stolen WordPress’ tagline? (Note: I’m sure someone in 1970 probably said “Code is Poetry” at DEC or something. šŸ˜‰ But it has been the WordPress tagline since day 1.)

29 thoughts on “Poetry is Microsoft

  1. Hasn’t that phrase been around a lot longer than WordPress? A quick Google search, yes indeed, points repeatedly and often to WordPress and WordPress-powered sites… but you also see pre-WP sites, especially related to Perl programming, for some strange reason…

    Just pointing out that WP doesn’t seem to have any special claim to the phrase, other than popularizing it a bit…

  2. While I agree that MS has copied lots of ideas, neither the Mac UI, nor Google personalise homepage are original. Mac UI -> NeXT and many other concepts from PARC. Personalised homepage has been done by so many companies it’s ludicrous to even bother mentioning Google.

  3. I agree, Kevin. Some would argue that start dot com and others inspired Google Personalised. I also think that Mac were inspired by Xerox and others.

    Couldn’t Microsoft be more original and go with “C0de 1s P0etry”?

  4. I had something else in mind, Carthik. Do you remember the same ol’ story about Gates patenting binary, i.e. 0’s and 1’s? That’s just what I had in mind…

    I guess it’s too late for me to file a patent for that. The US Patents Office submission is MSIE-only.

  5. Matt, this is your opportunity to make some money the American way: Litigation!

    Plus, rumor has it that MS will settle on most smaller cases.

  6. Have you registered WP’s tagline as a trademark? If not, please do so immediately because who knows that in the future, Microsoft will sueing WP’s developer just because using a tagline they already registered?

  7. No need to bash Microsoft guys, I mostly pointed it out because it’s funny. In my mind the more the idea and concept of “code is poetry” can spread the better things will be. Programming is a craft and more people should treat it as such.

  8. <quote>
    Nothing to see here, move along. Microsoft also stole many other ideas (they will never admit it): The Mac UI, Google Earth, Google personalised homepage (start dot com)
    <quote>

    Actually, I saw Microsoft demo a product like Google Earth at a tech conference back in 2001. I don’t know what they called it then, but it was hardly a Google innovation. Also, personalized homepages have been around since I got my first email address back in the mid nineties. When things like that (or a windowed/layered GUI) make sense and work intuitively, people are going to use them, whether you’re talking about Microsoft or Apple or the other countless people who have designed products that have “stolen” the idea behind the Mac UI.

  9. Worth pointing out that Start.com predates Google’s personalized home page. Not that either copied the other, since the last time I checked, major corporate product development takes more than a few days.

  10. Actually, having heard it before associated with Perl, etc. is different than having used it before to promote a product. Thereby potentially giving the phrase trademark status for WordPress. However, since WP is free, can’t really show monetary damages, eh? And is there the potential for anyone to be really confused into believing that WP and M$ are associated with each other? A great find though! Ha!

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  12. Whoops… bad go. Sorry. Serves me right for attempting to get clever and translate Shakespeare into pseudocode. Anyway,if Microsoft gets serious about the whole code is poetry thing, does that mean they might soon try to patent poetry? And what happens if they decide to change the equivalency operator in a later version? Will poetry be backward compatible? Or will it just throw an error?

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