What they mean is that they made a font by tracing screenshots of the Microsoft deliverable and then tidied it up a bit.
I'm aware copyright and fonts is a loaded topic, and I'm not advocating for a hardline stance, and making metrics-compatible free replacement fonts has always been a thing (I mean, that's what Arial itself is), but vibe-wise this is like when you steal your competitor's design and call it a "revival".
Along with the Windows 2000 sound bite, by god what a smarmy and off-putting deluge of ego-junk. My interest in their product certainly died.
You pretty well stepped into one by calling copyright infringement theft. In the US the glyphs cannot be copyrighted. I believe the hinting code contained within can be, however.
I tried to avoid it with the "vibe" bit, because I'm not actually offended by someone remixing a typeface, and I'm also professionally aware of some of the finer points of font licensing.
What I am responding negatively to is the communication style of this announcement. There's a lot of myth-making here, and calling it a revival, to aggrandize what just comes down to "we really like Arial for what we do, and we wanted a cleaned-up version of it that we own and could host on the web".
For one, if it was a true, spirited revival it'd be nice if it was a revival for anyone else as well, given how widely available Arial is. But as far as I can tell, they haven't published it for outside use anywhere, so it may well perish with the single website it's found on. Actual Arial will handily outlive this.
I'm aware copyright and fonts is a loaded topic, and I'm not advocating for a hardline stance, and making metrics-compatible free replacement fonts has always been a thing (I mean, that's what Arial itself is), but vibe-wise this is like when you steal your competitor's design and call it a "revival".
Along with the Windows 2000 sound bite, by god what a smarmy and off-putting deluge of ego-junk. My interest in their product certainly died.