They say living well is the best revenge. Others say the hell with that: revenge is the best revenge. A little software company may be about to prove both points of view right.
A lot of Mac users have a warm place in their hearts for Konfabulator, a program that allows you to run much smaller programs called widgets.
Widgets can do handy things like display a live weather forecast, give you a pop-up medication reference and tell you whether you’ve won the lottery. (That’s a piece of code even I could write: open a window and display the word “Nope”. It would work at least 99.99% of the time.)
Then Apple announced that an upcoming revision of its operating system would have something very much like Konfabulator built into it. One of the biggest selling points of OS X 10.4, dubbed “Tiger”, is Dashboard, which offers, yes, widgets that can do things like display the weather, pop up reference windows and… you get the picture.
Bad news for the folks at Konfabulator, who weren’t shy about complaining that Apple had just torpedoed their business model. They released a version for Windows, which could have been codenamed “Take that!” but which didn’t exactly bring Cupertino to their knees.
Not right away, anyway.
A few days ago, the Konfabulator people announced that they had achieved technology Nirvana, which these days means getting bought by Yahoo.
See, when we first thought of Konfabulator, one of the key pieces was accessing internet content. Well guess what Yahoo has boat-loads of? Yup. And what’s really great is that they’re starting to open it up to everyone in a format that’s useable outside the traditional browser, as XML feeds. Guess how they’re going to provide real-world examples of how to use this stuff. Yup… Konfabulator. So really, depending on how you look at it, we’re taking over Yahoo! We’re going to make it so the best way to access their data is via slick little Widgets.
So they’re (presumably) lying back in bathtubs full of Yahoo’s cash — the living well part. Now for revenge, part deux.
Yahoo is giving Konfabulator away for free. For Windows and Macs.
So say you’re building a widget. You can build it for Dashboard, in which case it’s available to that elite slice of the market that’s currently using Mac OS X 10.4. Or you can build it for Konfabulator, and capture not only that market segment, but the folks still using previous versions of OS X — and the Windows world.
The chances are good you’re going to bid Dashboard a fond farewell.
And Konfab’s vengeance isn’t complete. The program runs on OS X 10.2 and 10.3… which means customers can get one of the key features of 10.4 without giving Apple a dime.
Granted, Steve Jobs probably isn’t reading about all this and yowling “KhaaAAAAAaannnnnfabulator!” at the top of his lungs. It’s not like Dashboard is the heart of Apple’s long-run strategy. And maybe he’s already figured out a way to turn this to his advantage (possibly by making Dashboard run Konfabulator widgets).
But for now, this isn’t the best news Apple’s had. And somewhere on their way to their new home at Yahoo, Konfabulator’s makers are enjoying a dish best served cold.
Apple pioneered the desk accessory idea in 1984. The Konfabulator types are hardly the aggrieved party here.
I also suspect that it’s easier to create a dashboard widget than a Konfabulator widget. Free or not, the path of least resistance still goes to Apple.
I followed the whole Konfabulator-versus-desk-accessories debate when Dashboard was first unveiled. Frankly, I found both sides a little precious.
The complaining from Konfabulator and their defenders had more than a whiff of disappointment that they were actually facing competition. Yeah, Apple was moving in an area where they’d done a lot of pioneering work — moving forward, though, and building as well on some of Apple’s own work with AppleScript. Besides, good ideas get picked up, they evolve, time marches on… feel free to fill in the rest of that argument.
But the “they’re just desk accessories” argument misses something as well.
The key difference between Konfab/Dashboard and desk accessories, to my mind, is the simplicity of creating great-looking, useful widgets. For all their small size and focussed intent, desk accessories were still actual applications, with all the programming requirements that implies; non-programmers weren’t exactly invited to roll their own.
That, however, is one of the key selling points of widgets. The ease and speed of creating a widget mean a much broader potential development community, including reasonably savvy end-users themselves. Both KF and DB use the same underlying technologies, XML and Javascript (which, from a quick perusal of the documentation, land them in the same simplicity ballpark… although I give a hat tip to Apple for much simpler tutorials, especially for beginners).
Was Apple entitled to develop Dashboard? I’d argue yes.
Did they alienate developers, who worried they would just end up providing free R and D to Cupertino? Again, I’d argue yes.
Was it the right call? That’s for the MBAs — and the market — to decide.
But as a fan of innovation and choices, I’m pretty happy with how this is shaking down so far. And as a fan of a good story, I’m even happier.