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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
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Friday, August 2, 2002
12:30 - My dear Holmes, stick it in your ear
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2002/07/29.7.shtml

(top) link
I've been trying to stay out of this argument. The accusation that Apple's new Sherlock 3, as included in Jaguar, is a technological duplicate of Karelia's truly groundbreaking Watson application, has very neatly split the Mac community down the middle, and I'm still teetering on the fence.

One one hand you've got the backers of Watson, including its developer, Dan Wood. Their contention is that Apple has pulled a tactic that's Microsoftian in the extreme: they acknowledged the innovative nature of Watson, which is a consolidated and extensible framework for SOAP/XML tools which let you get movie showtimes/trailers, TV listings, package tracking information, flight times, eBay auction listings, weather, baseball scores, and a host of other pieces of functionality that harnesses the design advantages of dedicated client software layout rather than the inherent clunkiness of the Web to access publicly accessible XML databases-- by awarding Karelia Software, the maker of Watson, the coveted Apple Design Award for "Most Innovative Mac OS X Software". And then, on the very same day that the award was given, Apple announced Sherlock 3. Which is almost exactly the same thing.



The contingent who are indignant over this, and quite understandably so, see this as a betrayal by Apple. They could have compensated Dan Wood to some degree, or even just put a credit to Karelia in the About page on Sherlock 3. They liken this action to Microsoft giving Marc Andreesen a coveted design award for Netscape, and then immediately turning around and releasing Internet Explorer.

But then there's the other side of the argument, which is fairly well represented. These people say that Apple was perfectly well within their rights to develop Sherlock, which already had a fairly long history as a web-wide information-gathering tool, into a SOAP-based information browser with customized interfaces for each tool. Design-wise, it's really not that much different from Sherlock 2-- it's just that the information it presents is more useful and better laid out. It leverages the same technological foundations, developed by Apple in Cocoa, that Watson does-- it just takes publicly available XML data, furnished by other companies, and formats them in a nice way. There's a minimal amount of effort involved in putting this stuff together. That's the whole point of Cocoa. It was a no-brainer for Apple to redesign Sherlock to take advantage of this new functionality, and they would have done so even if Watson weren't around. (In fact, if Karelia hadn't done it, this stuff is so easy that somebody would have created something just like Watson.)

Or even (say these people) if Watson was inspirational to Apple, Apple has a long history of gradually folding into its OS the little tweaks and advancements made by third-party shareware developers. The menu-bar clock, WindowShade, and the Internet Control Panel were all third-party developments that Apple realized were so useful that they would be remiss if they did not include them in the core operating system. Sometimes they compensated the original developers, but usually they didn't. There was always a little bit of grumbling, but it was quickly forgotten as the new features came to benefit all users and be thought of as an indispensable part of the OS. Apple should be praised for seeing an opportunity for enhancing the user experience in an obvious new direction, rather than vilified for taking advantage of the poor third-party innovators.

These guys are accused by the first group of being Apple shills, of holding Apple to a double standard-- exonerating them of guilt for what they decry Microsoft for doing. And there's something to be said for that.

But there's a question one has to ask oneself. Does Apple have an obligation to sit on its hands and not develop some piece of technology, if there's an existing implementation of it out there that they might be stepping on? Or is third-party development inherently fraught with the danger that at any moment the OS maker might incorporate their functionality into the product (which, as long as it's not patented, is perfectly legal)-- and that it's their obligation to simply keep ahead of the curve?

iPhoto undoubtedly took some sales away from existing photo-manipulation apps and camera managers; iTunes has undisputably hurt the ability of MP3-player authors to sell their products. But in the latter case, Audion is a perfect example of a piece of shareware that keeps ahead of the curve. When a lot of their core functionality was co-opted by iTunes being integrated into the OS, they simply made their own product better. And now, while iTunes provides core music-playing functionality in an outstanding way, Audion is the only game in town if you want stuff like skins, album art, and alternative encoders and codecs. The makers of Audion understand what life is like in the shareware development world. You've got to stay hungry, or else you'll get eaten yourself.

And in any case, Apple's turning Sherlock into a Watson-like application for gathering Web-accesible data, and incorporating file search back into a quick adjunct to the Finder itself-- the way it always used to be, which is why it's called the Finder, for crying-out-loud-- is an excellent step. One thing that has pissed me off ever since OS 8 is that pressing Command-F to find a file fires up this big clunky application, rather than an instant search box. I think this is a perfectly reasonable direction for the design of the system to go, and the only unfortunate thing is that Watson predates it.

The Watson community, both developers and users, is lively and enthusiastic, and it's full of great minds and innovative thinkers. Naturally they feel slighted that Watson has been shafted by Apple-- or at least, the way they see it. Honestly, I agree to a certain extent. But I don't agree that Apple is under an obligation to acknowledge the influence of third-party developers upon their own development, especially when that development is an "obvious" direction for them to take. How does this differ from Microsoft seizing control of the Web by writing a browser and incorporating it into their OS? Not by much in the technical sense, but by quite a bit in the business sense. Microsoft consciously wanted to kill Netscape, because they saw the commercial potential in owning the Web. But Apple doesn't want to harm Karelia-- they want shareware developers like Karelia to keep innovating with new products like Watson which take full advantage of the opportunities afforded by OS X and Cocoa. But the direction in which they want to take Sherlock is one that they genuinely feel they'd be remiss in ignoring, and while committing to a new version of Sherlock that does what Watson does is sure to be a blow to Karelia, Apple considers that to be a regrettable but necessary sacrifice. There's no malice involved. Apple's actions are about functionality, not power. This is an argument about intent. That's where the difference lies, to me, though it's a nebulous and almost impossible-to-prove distinction.

Dan Wood can be proud that his innovation has influenced the development of Apple's core software. I know that's small comfort to him and to his loyal following, of which I'm a part. But if Watson were to be developed with the same fervor and the same love of creation that drives Audion, then a blow like Sherlock 3 or iTunes will not hurt so much-- it will just make the shareware community all the more innovative, by necessity as much as by desire.

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© Brian Tiemann