@gordonbowman's blog

@Bijan on Getting Sherlocked

Many years ago a company called Karelia developed a cool desktop app for the Mac called Watson.

Wikipedia describes the story of Karelia quite well:

The Karelia logo was inspired by events that occurred shortly after Dan Wood created Watson. The application was designed as a complement to Apple’s existing Sherlock 2 application, providing users various plug-ins to view specific internet content. Watson was released in November 2001, and the popularity of the program grew quickly.

Wood was later invited to a meeting at Apple, in which he was shown a demo of Sherlock 3, which incorporated the same look and nearly all of the modules featured in Watson. After voicing his displeasure to Apple Developer Relations, Wood received a phone call from Steve Jobs, during which Jobs indicated that he saw Karelia as the handcar in the way of the steam train that owns the tracks (a very similar experience to that of Cabel Sasser of Panic Software).

Reminds me of the Dropbox story when Drew Houston met with Steve Jobs.

It will be interesting to see where Apple fits in to all of this.