Hi Brandon. You're pretty snarky, especially for someone who wasn't there when it was being built. On the other hand, I <strong>was</strong> actually there because I was a member of the jQuery Project team and an employee of Microsoft when it was in development. In fact, John, Boris & I had plenty of chats about this new version of the templating engine. 

jQuery tmpl and John's Micro Templating experiment are incredibly different in both code bases and functionality. It's quite possible that Boris may have looked at John's original code but what John & Boris built are vastly different. Just look at <a href="http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/" rel="nofollow">John's code</a> and <a href="https://github.com/jquery/jquery-tmpl/blob/master/jquery.tmpl.js" rel="nofollow">Boris' code</a>.

Further, John mentioned the fact that we had originally considered using his Micro Templating engine but the new Microsoft version was much more robust. <a href="http://ajaxian.com/archives/jquery-data-binding-templates-and-mobile-john-resig-at-fowa" rel="nofollow">via Ajaxian</a>: 

"John told me his original Micro-Templating library was considered at one point, but the new templating is more refined."

So yes, the jQuery templating plugin was created by Microsoft and leveraged a lot of the in-house knowledge that MS had in their own JS-based templating functionality.You're grossly underestimating the work that went into this and the amount of MS in-house knowledge that was leveraged. And if you look at JSRender, the better version of jQuery tmpl, the differences are even more obvious.

Lastly, please tone done the snarkiness and try a more friendly approach. It goes a lot farther with me.