Why Watson is smarter than Sherlock

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Tim O'Reilly
Sep. 26, 2002 05:57 PM
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Derrick Story's interview with Dan Wood, author of Watson, brings out a very important point about why Watson deserves our attention.

Even if Watson weren't faster, and weren't the model on which Sherlock 3 is based, the plug in architecture makes all the difference. Apple made two big mistakes in knocking off Watson:

1. They did the Microsoft embrace and extend thing, which is potentially fatal in Apple's case, because they don't have the market heft to go it alone without small developers.

2. They left out the most important part. Watson is engineered to be a platform, while Sherlock is only an application. And a platform strategy beats an application strategy every time. I don't know if tiny Karelia will beat Apple in this specific battle, but I guarantee that someone else (most likely Microsoft) will emulate the platform aspect of Watson as well as the application, and will end up owning this new and important space.

If I were Apple, I'd run, not walk, to engage Dan in discussions about how they can work with him to take his ideas to the next level.

Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the Web 2.0 Summit, the Web 2.0 Expo, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, and the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar, "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is an activist for open source and open standards, and an opponent of software patents and other incursions of new intellectual property laws into the public domain. Tim's long-term vision for his company is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. For everything Tim, see tim.oreilly.com.

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Showing messages 1 through 9 of 9.

Agreed, Useless outside of the US
2002-12-13 07:42:38 anonymous2 [Reply | View]

I think that the US centric scope of BOTH Sherlock AND Watson is a shame. The real question is where are the UK developers of Sherlock and Watson channels? surely there must be some? How about a Channel for tracking with Royal Mail or Parcel Force? Or a searchable Sky/NTL TV schedule? or a streetmap.co.uk channel? Or one for London Underground/London Transport information? or a searchable British rail index? Traffic conjestion information complete with those London congestion cams? how about a CCTV viewer channel? the possibilities are endless.... but of course this all makes too much sense.

Useless in UK...
2002-11-02 06:23:43 anonymous2 [Reply | View]

So what can I do with Sherlock 3?

I can look up words in a US English dictionary.
I can translate from 6 languages to US English.
I can search and track eBay items in all 50 US states.
I can search the US versions of major search engines, but not in advanced search mode. (The tagline that I can use my favourite - sorry favorite - search engines is wrong)
Yellow pages, movies and so on don't show at all.

AppleCare is cool - but that could be in Help, couldn't it?

Sigh.

(Andy Macaulay - where did I put my login info...?)

Sherlock is Better
2002-09-29 23:13:06 jcteo [Reply | View]

After playing with both Sherlock 3 and Watson, I find Watson quite useless.

The whole point of a web service application is to provide a better user interface than browsers. I think Watson's creator has the right idea but failed to execute.

Sure Watson has more channels than Sherlock, but most of them are useless.

Take the eBay channel for instance. Watson's version of this channel is completely useless. The results of a search is just a list of matches and clicking on an item brings up the browser. What's the advantage of this over using the browser in the first place?

Same thing with the Google channel. What is the point? There's absolutely no reason not to just search with the browser directly.

Sherlock is much better thought out and has a more refined interface to boot. Add to it the fact that it comes with the OS, I think Watson is fast becoming irrelavant.

-jay

Watson is better
2002-09-27 16:55:40 anonymous2 [Reply | View]

I tried Watson before OS 10.2 was released, and liked it but found it overpriced at $30. I've since paid my $30 because I don't like the way Apple has handled this matter, but more importantly because Watson does most things better than Sherlock 3 does. The included TV listings module is great, and the movie search tool is much, much better than Sherlokc's -- Sherlock only gives me a few theaters per zip code, whereas Watson gets in nearly everything in my home county. I will admit the Sherlock's yellow pages feature with directions is superior, though.

not sure watson is better
2002-09-27 11:17:07 anonymous2 [Reply | View]

Yes, watson has more plugs and some of them do more than the apple version, but on the whole, the Apple ones have higher quality. Many of the watson plugs have an unfinished quality to them. Apple doesn't operate that way. Frankly, I think both have their place and I use both. But I use Sherlock for the things that overlap between the two (esp. the yellow pages, which provides directions)

Sherlock is a platform too
2002-09-27 10:42:36 anonymous2 [Reply | View]

Maybe the disappearance of Sherlock API is Apple's way to protect Watson.

Frankly, I don't really think Apple has behaved nearly as badly as MS, and we can't be sure that they actually borrowed anything from Watson despite the similarity - they might have started working on the new architecture well before the release of Watson.

It's probably fair to say that in this case each party has been inspired by the other. For instance, the name Watson itself was clearly derived from Sherlock, and it was Sherlock that introduced the channel idea many years ago.

In addition, a friendly competition is good for our beloved platform and all developers large or small, so Watson will survive if it's good enough. Apple is not in the business of wet nursing the week - they don't have that sort of resources. More importantly Apple is definitely not trying to drive any Mac developer out of business, quite the opposite - they are going out of their way to empower us with free and best-of-class programming tools, open sources, API documentation and examples, etc.

I have been programming on Windows and Unix (Sun Solaris, HP/UX, SGI Irix) for over a decade, and I can say without a shadow of doubt that nothing is remotely comparable to OS X for programmers, at any price. For instance, there are no tools on any platform that allow you build virtually functional apps with nearly zero user code other than Project Builder and Interface Builder, and you can program natively in industry standard languages like C/C++, Objective C/C++, Java. And of course, there are the usual OS X benefits too: lickable GUI, open and rock solid Unix core, vi, emacs, perl, python, ruby, bash, curl, tcl/tk, bash, apache, ..., all for free.

How much do the poor Windows programmer pay for Visual Studio.net? It's $1000 or $2500 for Professional or Enterprise Architect Edition, and $2799 per year for an MSDN Universal Subscription - all that money just for programming on an proprietary and inferior platform.

apple information void on Sherlock
2002-09-27 08:00:18 anonymous2 [Reply | View]

Sherlock 3 is a platform, too, but it's a well-kept secret. For a brief week or so after Jaguar was released, Apple had fairly detailed developer documentation on the ADC website describing the architecture of Sherlock 3, which were annuonced in an ADC newsletter. Sherlock 3 was clearly designed to be just as extensible via plugins as Watson. There was reference to an SDK that provided support for a special Sherlock panel in Interface Builder, but that SDK was never mentioned anywhere else on the ADC site. I was waiting for it to appear, but then the developer docs themselves suddenly disappeared and there hasn't been a peep from Apple since then about the Sherlock SDK.

silly...
2002-09-27 06:52:08 atmasphere [Reply | View]

It is very interesting to me that while sherlock is nice (no where near as nice as Watson) you can't do obvious things that work in some of the other 10.2 apps.

Example - you can drag an address listing out of the yellow pages from sherlock to your desktop, but it makes a bookmark, not a vCard! Why would you not be able to control+click and save to...or simply drag the listing right into your address book on the dock.

plugins
2002-09-27 04:44:54 anonymous2 [Reply | View]

Another problem is that I now cant run all my old plug-ins -- some of which I developed myself for Sherlock 1/2 -- on Mac OS X, except under Interarchie.

John Keogh
http://www.enkil.demon.co.uk/blog.html

Showing messages 1 through 9 of 9.

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