| Thursday, May 9, 2002 |
15:51 - Watson is dead-- long live Watson?
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0205/09.watson.php
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The fact that Sherlock 3, in the upcoming Jaguar release of OS X, resembles Watson a great deal both in functionality and in look-and-feel has not gone unnoticed or uncommented-upon.
Dan Wood of Karelia Software, the developer of Watson, confirmed for MacCentral that he had no part in the development of Sherlock 3. Wood also confirmed that Watson is alive and well and he will continue the development of the product.
"We see no reason not to continue development of Watson, especially basing any decisions on software from other companies that hasn't been released," Wood said.
Watson is an extendable application for Mac OS X that gives an Aqua interface to a number of Internet-based services such as stock quotes, telephone lookup and movie schedules. Watson functions much like Sherlock in that it bypasses the Web Browser for specific functionality. But instead of being a search engine, Watson connects to a handful of other useful services available on the Internet.
"Watson has been incredibly popular, and seems to have struck an emotional chord with its users," said Wood. "Many have written us to tell us that Watson is the reason that they finally took the plunge from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, and I have even heard stories of Wintel users who have been convinced to buy a Mac based on playing with Watson. It's incredibly gratifying to hear such stories."
Wood said that users could expect more plug-ins for Watson in the near future as the third-party developer community continues to develop.
"We do have a 'Weather' tool in progress, though I can't make any promises when it will be ready," said Wood. "Even more exciting is that the third-party developer community is starting to bear fruit. Watson has an open architecture, and any developer can make their own module. Around the corner, we will be seeing some great plug-ins for News, Genealogy, Sports Scores, Astronomy and so forth."
The feedback commentary on this story spans the poles of opinion. One contingent cheerfully agrees with Wood's confidence that the Watson user base will continue to support it and extend it; the opposition bemoans the imminent death of a truly outstanding product as Apple "Microsofts" it with a workalike app built into the OS.
Both sides have their merits, I must admit. It's easy to smell Redmond in Apple's handling of this matter. After all, what makes the free and integrated Sherlock 3 different from IE, and what makes the shareware/commercial Watson different from Netscape?
One could defend Apple here by saying that all Watson does is to access readily available XML database resources across the Internet, reformat them, and package them in a way that's easy to use an extensible; and Sherlock growing to encompass that kind of functionality is really a "no-brainer" for the kind of data-mining app it is, in this day and age of instant interconnectedness.
But honestly, isn't that just what web browsers were?
Just a couple of months ago, Apple awarded Karelia a coveted Apple Design Award for "Most Innovative Mac OS X Product", and continue to list it as a featured download, an exemplary piece of Mac OS X functionality in action. They're still touting Watson's superiority-- Apple is, not Karelia. That in itself is something that makes Apple different from Microsoft-- Microsoft never would have dreamed of endorsing Netscape while they were in full smush-all-competition mode. And frankly, I think Apple doesn't see Watson as any kind of "threat", particularly not on the order of how much Microsoft was threatened by the power of the Web when it wasn't clear that they could control it.
But then again, this is pretty much par for the course for Apple: their weekly OS X newsletter frequently features useful tools that third parties write in order to compensate for shortcomings in the core OS, and Apple isn't shy about implicitly admitting that those shortcomings exist. At one point, they endorsed Super Get Info, which provides the ability to edit Type and Creator codes and other pieces of meta-data; in the description of the product, Apple didn't dance around the fact that these were crucial pieces of functionality that were missing from the OS. They're not as paranoid as Microsoft.
But just the same, some say, Apple should have hired Dan Wood, or bought Watson, or paid Karelia a licensing sum-- and just because no law explicitly would require them to do so, it would have been nice of them.
If it was the "obvious" next step in functionality for Sherlock to evolve into a Watson-like tool which taps public XML databases, then we would have to grudgingly accept that the same reasoning is valid for Microsoft building IE into Windows.
Watson has an open architecture, which means that anybody can write new modules to add to it, potentially extending its feature lead over and beyond Sherlock-- but then again, Sherlock's architecture is open too, and anybody can write modules for it as well.
So it may well be that Watson's main differentiating feature from Sherlock will be presentation-- the "drawer" concept (which Sherlock 3 doesn't seem to use), the more Aqua-like (rather than brushed-metal) UI motif, and the psychological satisfaction of there being "a Watson to complement Apple's Sherlock" (frankly, one of Watson's biggest selling points, when you get right down to it-- people love to live by metaphor, even when it gets stretched beyond usefulness).
Then again, Karelia might discover some new dimension in which to take Watson-- something that can't be matched by the contemporary generation of Sherlock. That would be further proof of the innovativeness of the Mac-using community, and I don't doubt that that will in fact happen.
But even so, Apple may have burned up some goodwill among fiercely loyal Watson fans with the Sherlock 3 maneuver-- though that goodwill would be immediately and firmly restored with an act of good faith by Apple (an offer to buy Watson, to pay Wood for the innovation, a discount on OS X-- or simply an acknowledgment somewhere of Watson's influence on Sherlock's development).
It's not terribly likely, but Apple has surprised us with weirder things in the past.
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