[corin_]

His parentheses made you miss the rest of his sentence.

> Both arrived at these solutions at the same time because the wide availability of capacitive touchscreens (...) made such UIs an obvious next step to anyone paying attention to the field.

He was saying that capacitive was inspiration to both, not used by both.

[nirvana]

Right, given the flammability of wood, fire was an obvious next step.

This is nonsense. It is just rejecting innovation out of hand by claiming that it was obvious.

Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc fallacy.

[qu4z-2]

Perhaps it wasn't obvious, but clearly it was obvious enough that MS came up with it too.