DoDots

» see dodots.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

DoDots lived about two years and spent them in the narrow gap between the browser wars ending and broadband arriving. In 2000 I was sixteen, in Turkey, on a dial-up account where the browser was the whole internet and installing a separate Windows client to read a website would have been a strange way to spend a connection. This was built for people whose computers were already online when they sat down, which in 2000 mostly meant California.

The company started in 1999 in Palo Alto, founded by the brothers George and John Kembel along with Tony Medrano, with George as CEO and John as CTO. Their argument was that the browser was doing too much. A weather report does not need tabs or a back button or an address bar. It needs a small frame sized to a weather report. So DoDots let a publisher cut a piece of their site loose, wrap it in its own little window with its own buttons, and hand it out. Each one was a Dot. You kept them in a client, also called DoDots, and they sat on your desktop the way applications do now.

By the company's own final count the platform carried over 50 companies and 400 independent developers. ABC shipped a branded build, which is why the uninstall instructions on the shutdown page tell you to look for either "DoDots" or "ABC Dots" in Add/Remove Programs. The demo at DemoMobile 2000 won an award and the company was proud enough of it that the shutdown page kept a link to the video.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what a dot actually was ~

The closest living relative is the widget, and DoDots got there early enough that nobody had a word for it. Konfabulator arrived on the Mac in 2003, Apple shipped Dashboard in 2005, Google and Yahoo ran gadget directories after that, and the iPhone App Store opened in 2008. DoDots was describing a world of small single-purpose windows pulled from the web and kept locally, in 1999, to people on dial-up who had no reason to want one.

What it needed was a connection that was always on and a habit of installing software from publishers you had never heard of. Both arrived eventually. Neither had arrived by the spring of 2001, when the funding ran out.

~ the letter on the door ~

Sometime between 2 and 30 March 2001, every link in the navigation on dodots.com was rewritten to point at a single file called page2.html. The design stayed exactly as it was. The menu still offered Dot Solutions and Developer Zone and the rest of it, and every one of those links now went to the same page, which was titled "DoDots Closes its Doors".

It opens: "Almost two years ago, we set out to take the Internet in a new direction." Then the count of companies and developers, then the sentence that does the work, which is "We are disappointed that major changes in the marketplace now require that we shut down our operations." It thanks customers for their enthusiastic support, hopes they enjoyed the experience, signs off as "the DoDots team", and offers the DemoMobile video to anyone who missed what the fuss was about. Below that there are two email paths, one for buying the intellectual property and one for everything else, which routes to Sherwood Partners, Inc. of 1849 Sawtelle Blvd in Los Angeles. Sherwood was the assignee that wound up a long line of these companies, and the same address turns up on SportBrain's out-of-business notice five months later.

The last item on the page is numbered uninstall instructions. Start menu, Settings, Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, pick DoDots or ABC Dots, follow the directions. Step six is "Thanks for using DoDots!" The site kept serving that page, nav and all, until at least July 2002, and by the end of 2003 the domain belonged to a search-ad parking operation.

~ the part that did not die ~

George Kembel went on to co-found the Stanford d.school. The patents went somewhere else. DoDots had filed on what it called a Networked Interactive Module, which is what a Dot was underneath, and those filings kept issuing for years after there was a company left to own them, with Kembel named as an inventor on grants dated well into the 2010s. The specifications are worth opening for one reason: they still quote live example URLs from the product, including a Dot that was a calculator, at dodots.com/dots/Calc/CALCULATOR2.htm. The patent office is holding the only working description of what the thing did.

In May 2022 an entity named DoDots Licensing Solutions LLC sued Apple, Samsung and Best Buy in the Western District of Texas over those patents, backed by litigation funding. The cases moved to the Northern District of California and the claim constructions came down to what a Networked Interactive Module has to be: whether it must be fully configurable, whether its template has to define the characteristics of a control. The Federal Circuit heard argument in 2025. A company that could not survive the spring of 2001 was still being argued about in a courtroom twenty-four years later, by people who never built a Dot.

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