[Am-info] Jobs Touts OS, Unveils New IPod

[Mitch Stone]

On Saturday, July 20, 2002, at 05:45 PM, Sujal Shah wrote:

> On Sat, 2002-07-20 at 20:10, Mitch Stone wrote:
> [SNIP]
>> Sherlock 3 will apparently be functionally very similar to Karella's
>> Watson. In fact when it was leaked out to the rumor sites a month or so
>> back, it looked for all the world like Apple had bought Watson. According
>> to Karella, this isn't the case. Odd, I thought, since the author
>> demonstrated Watson to a very enthusiastic audience in a side-session at
>> last January's MW. I used Watson for a month or so until the demo license
>> expired and probably would have purchased it had Apple's plans for
>> Sherlock 3 not come to light.
>>
>
> Which is annoying, and rather unfortunate.  I understand that Sherlock
> had a natural evolution toward Watson, but I wish Apple had handled it
> differently.  This is just ham fisted PR, something that they don't need
> along with the (deserved or undeserved) negative PR that they are
> getting because of .Mac and Jaguar's upgrade price.
>
> Of course, I'm one of the third-party developers for Watson (I developed
> an open source tool for Watson for baseball scores, see my home page),
> so I'm a little biased (not that much since I wasn't trying to make
> money, actually, but I feel bad for Dan).
>
> Sujal

I agree. After Dan did his demo of Watson at MacWorld, the reaction of 
everyone I spoke to was "This is the kind of application that sells 
computers. Apple should buy this product right away." What they choose to 
do was not the sort of thing Apple does ordinarily; which is to say, 
behave like Microsoft. Might Dan have been asking too much for Watson? I'd 
sure like to know the inside story. A lot of people would.

Mitch