When a product is popular, there’s often an ecosystem of third-party products that people can buy to extend, enhance, and accessorize the original product. Take cellphones. When you buy a cellphone, there’s a good chance that you’re also in the market for a case, for a screen protector, for earbuds, for a pop socket, for a table stand, and so on. And of course you might buy dozens of apps that extend what you can do with your new in-pocket computer.
But suppose that the original manufacturer starts including some of these extensions or accessories as part of the product. Imagine that you create a game for the iPhone in which you use catapults to shoot birds at pigs, and this game becomes inexplicably popular. But two years later, there’s a new version of the iPhone, and as part of the upgrades to the phone, there’s a game on the phone that lets people shoot birds at pigs. It’s included right there with the phone! Why would anyone now buy your app?
I learned a word for this scenario recently: you, the poor game developer, have been sherlocked.[1]
This term originates in the world of Apple computers. The history of the term is not dissimilar from what I just described for the iPhone, except that in this case it’s about an accessory for macOS, which is the operating system used for the Mac.
Many years ago, the Mac included a utility called Sherlock that let users search files on their computer, and that included a way to search the web directly from the desktop. The developer Dan Wood saw an opportunity and created a companion product called Watson that added a “toolkit” of search modules for things like movie listings, weather, stock prices, telephone numbers, and other information that the app could glean from web services.
Watson was a hit. Then along came Sherlock version 3. This version introduced “channels,” as Apple called them, which included things like stocks, movies, flights, and dictionary terms. Hmm. Although Sherlock 3 was not as good as Watson (at least, Dan Wood says people told him that), the writing was on the wall. Wood sold the product to Sun Microsystems. (To add insult to injury, Wood’s next project was an easy-to-use website-creation tool called Sandvox that came out before Apple introduced iWeb, an easy-to-use website-creation tool.)
This incident of the Apple Sherlock app obviating the need for a third-party product spawned the term sherlocking. If you search for “to be sherlocked,” you find many examples where developers claim that Apple looked at successful products and then later included versions of those in its own product releases. As one developer wrote, “A big misconception is that your main competitors are the other companies creating similar products to yours. […] But all along, we really should have been worried about our platform provider, Apple.”
Apple is not the only company that sherlocks people. Windows has incorporated features that at one point were products from third parties. For example, Windows lets you perform tasks like compressing files (creating ZIP files) and monitoring for viruses, both of which used to require you to install separate programs. Perhaps most famously, Windows 95 included Internet Explorer, a web browser, which made life hard for Netscape Navigator, an add-in browser.
However, I’m not aware of a term like to be sherlocked for situations like this that have happened at the hands of other companies, like Microsoft, Google, Twitter, or Facebook. (Well, one term comes to mind: to be screwed.) The term sherlocking is, per its history, pretty Apple-specific. It would be interesting if to be sherlocked became a cross-platform term, so to speak. We’ll have to wait and see.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
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[1] Full disclosure: I’ve used PCs for 40 years, but I’m a latecomer to the Mac, having only started using one about four years ago. Therefore, many things about the Apple ecosystem are new (and/or mysterious) to me still, including its vocabulary. [^]