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Or Maybe It's Desktop Widgets That Everyone Will Fight Over

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the widgets-everywhere dept

Wed, Sep 14th 2005 2:37am — Mike Masnick
So maybe it isn't blog searching that's the next big battlefield for search engines. A month and a half after Yahoo picked up widget maker Konfabulator and Google launched their Sidebar app, Microsoft is launching Microsoft Gadgets -- which is basically a clone of Konfabulator or Apple's Dashboard Widgets (itself a clone of Konfabulator). It's not hard to see why everyone's trying to jump out of the browser and onto the desktop, but that desktop is going to get pretty crowded pretty quickly.
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9 Comments

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  • identicon
    NSN, 14 Sep 2005 @ 3:15am

    Learn your history...

    Here's a site that's also addressed the FUD you've presented about Dashboard being a copy of Konfabulator: http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/6887/ Might want to read the comments, too. Plenty of info there about Apple having Desktop Accessories as early as 1984....so who's copying whom?

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Greg, 14 Sep 2005 @ 12:22pm

      Re: Learn your history...

      NSN - The idea that Konfabulator/Widgets are copies of Desktop Accessories. The unique thing about Desktop Accessories was that it compensated for the Mac's inability to multitask properly. The general idea of a desk accessory that performs A specific small program performing a specific task is itself not anybody's innovation; Microsoft has had stuff such as Calculator in Windows forever as well. These types of programs are as old as pcs. Claiming that Konfabulator is a copy of Desk Accessories is like claiming Word is a copy of WordStar. They're obviously in the same class of applications, but that does not mean the later product is a copy. The innovation of Konfabulator is how it works, and that the way it works enables users to make their own Widgets. That is what Apple copied.

      [ link to this | view in chronology ]

      • identicon
        De Badd Ass, 14 Sep 2005 @ 2:47pm

        Re: Learn your history...

        Hmmm.... I made my own desk accessory back in the eighties. It wasn't very hard although it was written in C.

        Plenty of others made them as well. Some even sold them as shareware or commercial software - companies like Mark of the Unicorn.

        That's the big difference between Tiger Widgets and Konfabulator. The Konfabulator license won't let you sell Widgets. That's why Tiger Widgets attracts the better developers.

        [ link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Jeff, 14 Sep 2005 @ 6:27am

    Microsoft has OS X envy

    Lets face it. Microsoft envies Apple. They want to be cool like Apple. Office 12 looks like an OS X application. Vista is basically Microsoft's version of OS X (5 years behind). And now they want Desktop Widgets. Come on Microsoft, can't you come up with one original idea?

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 14 Sep 2005 @ 10:31am

      Re: Microsoft has OS X envy

      I think 99% of apple users are just naive bigots.

      [ link to this | view in chronology ]

      • identicon
        g0es, 14 Sep 2005 @ 11:54am

        Re: Microsoft has OS X envy

        isn't bigot a strong word. The apple cult can be bad, but i don't think it is that bad.

        Who care about who copied who. Widgets can be handy and as long as they aren't the exact same product from each company widgets will become better. Look at GUIs in general. If apple hadn't come out with OS X there would be no reason for Microsoft to make a better GUI.

        [ link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 14 Sep 2005 @ 8:09am

    No Subject Given

    "It's", not "its".

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    digiGURU, 14 Sep 2005 @ 10:27am

    M$ Gadgets

    Doesn't this remind you of the _FAILED_ M$ desktop scheme called "channels" ??? Where stuff could be presented using "rich" DHTML content....

    Duh!

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Raymond Chen, 14 Sep 2005 @ 11:59pm

    Yawn. Active Desktop.

    I guess nobody remembers Active Desktop from 1998, which predated Konfabulator by a few years.

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]


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