Karelia Watson

» see karelia.com/watson as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i missed watson on platform alone. in 2001 i was 17 in ankara on a windows xp pc, mac os x had launched eight months earlier and the entire turkish mac install base was maybe a few thousand graphic designers in istanbul. watson was mac-only at $30 in usd, the credit-card billing was an apple-shop-only flow. that was not a market i was part of. close enough.

dan wood at karelia software shipped watson on november 27 '01 with a small plugin system. the surface was a single window with tabs along the side, each tab was a plugin that pulled internet content into a native mac interface. weather, stock quotes, package tracking, movie showtimes, yellow pages, dictionary lookups all came as separate plugins. third parties could write their own plugins in objective-c against the karelia sdk. that openness meant the plugin library grew fast through '02, beyond what karelia could have shipped itself.

the apple design awards in june '02 gave watson the best mac os x developer application prize. close enough. dan wood gave the keynote acceptance speech. that was the high point. anyway, three months later on september 18 '02 apple shipped mac os x 10.2 jaguar with sherlock 3 included. sherlock 3 had the same channel-based interface with apple-built plugins for weather and stocks, then yellow pages a release later. apple's framing was that sherlock had always been the platform feature, watson had simply explored the same idea. dan wood's framing was that apple had copied a third-party product and bundled it free against a paid commercial competitor.

the karelia blog post that announced sherlock 3 contained dan wood's recollection that steve jobs had called him personally before the wwdc announcement to say sherlock 3 was coming. close enough. the call did not include any offer of compensation or acquisition. wood kept developing watson through '03 and into '04, trying to differentiate on plugin breadth and on the depth of the cocoa sdk that third parties used. sales fell off a cliff anyway. the existence of a free os-bundled version of the same product was the kind of competition no $30 commercial app could survive.

on november 24 '04 dan wood posted the watson registration code to the karelia blog. anyone could now type the code into the trial version and unlock the full app for free. that gesture ended paid sales of watson as a brand. close enough. karelia software pivoted to sandvox, a mac website-building app, which kept the company going for the next decade and a half. watson stopped being maintained, the cocoa version's last update shipped in late '04 and that was the end of it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how sherlocked entered the vocabulary ~

the verb "sherlocked" came out of the karelia situation directly. mac developer forums after wwdc '02 started using "sherlocked" to mean apple absorbing a third-party app's features into the os without compensation. close enough. the term stuck because the sherlock 3 case was so specific, an apple-design-award-winning paid product getting cloned into the bundled free os utility nine months later. the verb spread beyond the immediate karelia community over '03-'08 and became the standard mac-developer shorthand for the same risk. konfabulator getting absorbed into dashboard in '05 was the next major sherlocking, by then the word was already in regular use.

~ the watson plugin economy ~

watson's plugin system was the part the design awards committee specifically praised. anyway, dan wood had built a small but functional sdk that let any cocoa developer write a watson channel without touching karelia code. by mid-'02 there were probably 30 to 40 third-party plugins, covering everything from amazon book lookups to imdb to airport delays. close enough. that economy disappeared overnight when sherlock 3 shipped, since sherlock 3 had no third-party plugin api and apple was now building all the channels in-house. the third-party developers who had written watson plugins had nothing to port their code to, the cocoa skills carried over but the user base did not.

~ what dan wood did after ~

karelia software did not close. dan wood shipped sandvox in '06 as a mac website-builder, the same indie-mac-developer pattern at lower direct apple competition. sandvox kept karelia going through the late '00s and into the '10s, with mac app store distribution after '11. close enough. wood himself stayed on the mac platform throughout, writing about sherlocking and the indie-mac business model on the karelia blog through the konfabulator and growl absorption cases. the original watson archive page stayed on karelia.com as a historical artifact, the registration-code-release post visible to anyone who clicked through. wood treated the whole arc as a survivable mistake, the company continued, the verb sherlocked entered the language and karelia ended up being remembered through it.

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