Microsoft Exec Claims Credit to Mac OS X

This story made me chuckle.  

According to CNet, Microsoft Head of Research, Mr Rick Rashid was quoted as saying:

If you use a Macintosh or an iPhone, which honestly I would not recommend, you would be using code that I wrote more than 25 years ago.

I could be taking this quote entirely out of context, but I find this terribly amusing.  To be fair, Mr Rashid is partly responsible for the Mach kernel used in the FreeBSD variant of Unix.  FreeBSD was of the components later developed to make up Darwin, which is one of the foundations of Mac OS X and later, the iPhone. 

But this is stretching it a little too far for me.  In this case, would Alexander Graham Bell be credited as one the iPhone’s creators since technically, he was widely credited as inventing the telephone.  How about Thomas Edison as a co-inventor of the iPod, since he invented the phonograph.

Mr Rashid went on to say:

It just shows you things really do survive and get used in interesting ways.

Let’s add humility to the list of achievements Mr Rashid can be proud of, right above claiming credit for your competitor’s key technology.  

The good thing is that, Mr Rashid’s comments can be seen as a concerted effort on Microsoft’s part to dismiss the iPhone. 

The bad thing is if Mr Rashid is saying he’s partly responsible for Mac OS X/iPhone but not recommending it, is he saying something about the quality of what he developed?

OK, perhaps I’m over-reading into this.  But if he meant what he said, then I wonder how Vista is working out for him.