There are those who say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Of course, there are also those who say that it's the sincerest form of being a cheap-ass copycat with a sense of aesthetics that runs shallower than your average Slip 'N' Slide, so it all comes down to perspective. Remember about a week and a half ago when we noted that one of Microsoft's directors of Windows platform evangelism killed a few minutes during an eight-hour conference call by dressing up his Wintel laptop to look a little more like it was running Mac OS X? You just gotta love it when even Redmond's platform evangelists look at XP's interface and realize that something's drastically amiss.

However, irony with the job title aside, it turns out that what he did to his VAIO wasn't so far out of the ordinary after all. Faithful viewer andrü noticed a WIRED article about the practice of making Windows look as much like Mac OS X as possible, also known as the process of shining a big, steaming pile of... well, whatever. The point is, WIRED uncovered several instances of Windows's Aquafication far more complete and obsessive than that one we saw a couple of weeks back. We wouldn't go so far as to call any of them "indistinguishable," but the amount of time and effort collectively devoted to making Windows look like Mac OS X is, frankly, staggering.

"A dozen or more" web sites are dedicated to the challenge; AquaXP has 9,500 members, while Aqua-Soft.org has over 16,000. A Windows XP theme that looks like Jaguar-era Aqua was reportedly downloaded 50,000 times. The theme's creator notes that "the community is healthier and stronger than ever." Hear that, folks? There's a whole community working on this. Kinda makes you wonder how much they could accomplish if, well, they actually bought and used Macs instead of spending countless hours dorking around with counterfeiting the surface level of its interface.

For end users, the process isn't necessarily all that time-intensive, since "the community" has done a lot of the heavy lifting; download and install a few Aquafied XP themes, an icon pack or two, a dock emulator, skinnable apps like Trillian for instant messaging and Thunderbird for email, and voilà: "a Windows box is transformed into a Mac." Except, of course, for the fact that spray-painting a lemon to look like an orange doesn't actually make it taste any sweeter.

Well, unless the paint is syrup-based. Then we suppose it might work. But otherwise, no.

The entire phenomenon is both baffling and the most understandable thing in the world. Who wouldn't prefer Aqua to that mess of circus colors Microsoft squirted out for the Windows XP interface? But if so many Windows users think the Mac's look and feel is superior enough to spend hours emulating it, why, in this era of $799 eMacs, aren't more of them switching? We fully understand how major a step a platform jump can be, but with tens of thousands of Wintellians expending all this energy to ape Aqua, you'd think more of them would have the time, money, and guts to make the leap to the real thing. Then again, we suppose the fact that they chose Windows to begin with speaks volumes about why, so never mind.

There is, of course, one obvious computer candidate for a righteous Aquafication, and that is the Wintel forced on a Mac user in the workplace. For the Aqua-on-XP crowd who are actually Mac users just trying to make life easier with the systems they're forced to use at work, we can get behind that completely; after all, if you're forced to endure an eight-hour savage beating with a crowbar five days out of each seven, the least you can do is spray-paint the crowbar your favorite color.

And actually, now that we think about it, if Wintel users can develop even a primitive appreciation of Aqua by slapping a new coat of paint on their interface, that may conceivably lead to openmindedness about Apple the next time they need a new computer. At the very least it's probably boosting the world's average Taste Quotient by a few millionths of a point. So what the heck, folks; Aquafy to your hearts' desires. But for the full-time Wintellians among you, just try to check out the real thing once or twice to see what you're missing, okay?