Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, took the stage to bash the beta version of Vista in front of the crowd of Mac developers. For example, Serlet compared the iCal application in Mac OS X Tiger to the Windows Calendar available in the beta versions of Windows Vista.

Serlet pointed to similarities between Apple’s Spotlight tool and the integrated search box that will be part of Windows Vista. Microsoft has made improved search tools a main priority for Vista, but Apple’s Spotlight tool has been doing this since the company released Tiger, the current version of the operating system.

Jobs stood before the images of the five versions of Mac OS X that Apple has shipped in the last five years, a period in which Microsoft hasn’t shipped a major update. (It did release Media Center and Tablet PC versions of the operating system, as well as the hefty Service Pack 2). “This is what we’ve been doing for the past five years. What has our competitor been doing for the past five years?” Jobs rhetorically asked the audience to laughter and applause.

Apple devoted an awfully large portion of its keynote to attacks on Microsoft, even for someone who loves to tweak Redmond as much as Jobs.rn”Our friends up north spend up to $5 billion on R&D, and these days all they seem to be able to do is copy Google and Apple,” he said.