At 22:58 -0500 2003.01.03, Peter R. Wood wrote: >The general sequence of events was: Apple releases original Sherlock; >Karelia releases Watson to 'complement' Sherlock; Apple awards Karelia >'Most Innovative Mac OS X Product of 2002'; Apple releases Sherlock 3 >(which is a dead ringer for Watson) as part of Jaguar.
I am a big fan of Watson, but I think Karelia overblows all this. If you look at Watson, there is very little, if anything, innovative or new or original about it, either in functionality or interface or concept. The idea of web services certainly didn't originate there, nor did scraping web pages or plopping another UI on top of web searches, nor did pulling together multiple services into a single app, etc. And as far as the UI: Sherlock looks just like most other Mac OS X apps; if anything, Watson "stole" it from Apple. I love Watson and use it all the time, but I can't see what Apple did wrong ... except for not making Sherlock a very good product (it is slow and not very useful). Next thing you know, people are going to attack other web browsers for putting a toolbar above the page! >Watson has advantages in performance and expandability, but does carry a >licensing fee in order to obtain full functionality. IIRC, you lose *all* functionality if you don't pay the fee (I bought the home site license, so I could install it on all my computers). -- Chris Nandor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://pudge.net/ Open Source Development Network [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://osdn.com/ _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
