| Tuesday, November 30, 2004 |
11:23 - Wrong place at the wrong time
http://weblog.karelia.com/MacOSX/WatsonStatus.html
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Marcus spotted this. Apparently Dan Wood's Karelia, the company that brought us Watson (which predated the current incarnation of Sherlock in vision and functionality), has followed very much the same path over the past few years as Panic has, as the maker of a popular and visionary third-party Mac app that was then steamrolled by Apple's own products. Many details of the two companies' stories occurred in parallel. Yet Panic remains one of the best-loved cottage companies in the Mac world, and Karelia has become little more than a bitter footnote, with Watson having been sold off to Sun and its original developer now barred from even distributing it or owning the source code. Why the difference?
I think a lot of it is attitude. Panic's Cabel Sasser and his partners have maintained a nigh-superhuman level of optimism and vigor throughout their adventure; they're in it for the love of the craft, and the notoriety they've achieved and the (modest) commercial success of their products pales for them in comparison to the satisfaction of having spread universally-loved memes that show up in unexpected places. Karelia, on the other hand, responded to the previews in early Jaguar betas of Sherlock 3, which was pretty much a functional clone of Watson, with no small amount of protest. Sure, it was justified. I'd have probably done the same. But the bitterness with which Dan Wood handled the development, and his downer of a prospect of taking Watson to Windows in protest, left a sour taste in the mouths of much of the community. Watson still has some die-hard adherents, and Karelia's boards are still fairly active, but it looks like it's grinding to a halt at last—and Karelia's name will never be as revered as Panic's, even as both companies' flagship products enter the same silent retirement.
Is the lesson here to be that if you're a third-party Mac developer, you have to have the ability to just suck up punishment with a sunny smile, make grateful obeisance even to the most backhanded of rebuffs from Apple, and respond by being even more ingenious with your next offering, knowing full well that it'll probably meet the same fate? Is the lesson that if you stand up for yourself and do the "right" thing, you should expect to lose all the goodwill you'd built up among your fans, along with the benefits of your creations? Maybe... or else maybe it's just a matter of having a good ear for business in the Big Boardroom style, of knowing how to play the big dogs' game. Neither of these companies seems to have been quick enough on their feet to really come out on top... but in the end it's attitude that rules whose name survives the winnowing of history.
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Brian Tiemann
