Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Apple Corporate, Software
Where Apple Went Wrong With Widgets
If you haven't heard yet, Yahoo! purchased Konfabulator and launched Yahoo! widgets today.As you may recall, soon after Apple announced that Dashboard and Widgets would be a new feature of Tiger, several people, including yours truly, complained that Apple was ripping off the Konfabulator people and should have done the right thing by buying out Konfabulator.
In light of today's Yahoo! widgets announcement, Apple's mistake is even clearer: If they had grabbed Konfabulator when they had the chance, then they wouldn't have had to deal with Konfabulator's small group of loyal followers when they first released Dashboard. As an added bonus, today Apple wouldn't be facing a cross-platform Yahoo!-sponsored free version of one of Tiger's most highly talked-up features.
Does anyone else out there think this was a huge mistake on Apple's part?
Get a WordPress.com Blog
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
timothy broyles said 2:32PM on 7-25-2005
No, not really much of a problem for apple. The devotees of Konfabulator are a VERY small group, which while it sucks for them, the other 99% of Mac users couldn't care less, unfortunately.
Reply
Ej said 1:43PM on 7-25-2005
I completly agree, now more then ever (since knofabulator is free) people will be morelikely to use Konfabulator which is just as good, if not better, than Dashboard (i.e. being able to quit (read:exit) the program).
Reply
The Jeremy said 1:44PM on 7-25-2005
Huge mistake. Apple should have purchased the company cheaply and then patented everything they could. With this purchase, Yahoo could still turn around and license/sell this acquisition so that Microsoft could implement it into Windows Vista yet.
Reply
CcntMnky said 1:46PM on 7-25-2005
Now it definitely looks like a big business mistake. I don't know how cross-compatible the two options are, but if I were developing a widget, I would seriously consider writing for Yahoo/Konfab.
Not to mention how bad of a kick-to-the-nuts that was to the Konfabulator developers.
Reply
Yebot said 1:49PM on 7-25-2005
Not a huge mistake methinks. Konfabulator & Dashboard remind me of a toy that I might have been givin when I was 9 years old - a toy that was played-with for a day and forgotten about.
I do agree that the Konfab people probably deserved some Apple money. But now they have Yahoo money. I'll wager they are happy.
Reply
simon saunders said 5:08PM on 9-03-2005
In the words of one of Yahoo's senior execs, their policy of ignoring Mac users is because "it's so not worth our while catering to under 5% of the personal computer market."
The problem with "small groups of loyal followers" is that hardly anyone gives a proverbial monkey's about them.
Flickr, for example, another recent Yahoo acquisition, offered two free Pro invitations to Pro subscribers, but slipped the expiry under the net by small-printing it and notifying members *after* its expiry.
It's annoying that Apple's widgets aren't as nicely implemented as Konfabulator's. It's a shame someone couldn't sponsor a lawsuit that'd have earned Konfabulator a decent amount of cash so they didn't have to sell out to Yahoo.
Reply
Eric said 1:50PM on 7-25-2005
It does seem that if Apple had brought the Konfabulator developers on-board instead of trying to kill them off, that Apple would have been years ahead of PCs on Widgets for some years to come. Still, Apple has done something amazing: developers seem to want to write Widgets for everything, and the vast majority of them are offered for free. This means a lot of shareware apps are now effectively dead, and so Mac users can now easily download and get a lot of additional functionality for free. I expect additional Widgets will come pre-loaded as time goes on.
Reply
Penginkun said 1:55PM on 7-25-2005
Not really, no. The idea of "widgets" was hardly original to Konfabulator. It goes all the way back to the earliest versions of the Macintosh OS, and even farther back to PARC. Apple isn't ripping them off any more than Toyota is ripping off Ford by offering similar products. Did you complain, CK, that Konfabulator was ripping off Stardock Object Desktop? No? Why not?
Simply put, there is no "right thing" to have been done here. Sure, Apple may have been inspired by Konfabulator's success to create the Dashboard. Won't argue with you there. But now where there was one product, we have TWO, and they're not mutually exclusive you know. Now we have competition. Not a bad thing at all. Apple is under no obligation to buy a company just because it implements a similar feature in its OS.
Reply
Jeremy said 1:56PM on 7-25-2005
Not even a little bit. The only relationship between Dashboard and Konfabulator is that it's the same basic kind of idea; the implementations are entirely different, and Konfabulator is a really bad implementation of what Apple did very much better with Dashboard. Doing the same kind of idea better doesn't mean you owe anything to the people who did it poorly first.
I don't see Yahoo being "free" as any kind of problem; Dashboard is free, too. I wouldn't have made a Konfabulator widget, since the environment was so stupid and the implementation was so bad, but Dashboard is really nice to code for.
Reply
Andre said 1:58PM on 7-25-2005
Konfabulator started out for me as a novelty. It was great to use in the beginning, and had me downloading lots of really nice widgets, but the fad soon ended, and by then, I only gone down to using only 2 widgets.
I like Konfabulator, don't get me wrong, but I like Tiger's implementation much better. I don't want my widgets to be hiding under a window, or to float above an active application's window when I work on my Mac.
This is where Dashboard shines. When I want my widgets, it's there, and when I want to get back to do my work, it's gone, out of the way.
Yeah, I agree that Apple should have worked something out with the original Konfab team, but too bad that didn't happen. :-/
The Jeremy: If I'm not wrong, I think "Longhorn" or Vista does have some sidebar thingy. And don't forget that Konfabulator does work on Windows.
Reply
Sumit Chachra said 1:58PM on 7-25-2005
Sure it was! As a new Mac addict and Tiger user I am surprised at the similarities between Dashboard and Konfabulator. Now that its free I'm going to be running both of them!!
Its a big thing for Windows I think... since Tiger addicts may chose to stick with Dashboard given the way its been integrated with the OS.
Reply
Sean said 2:01PM on 7-25-2005
A multi-billion-dollar-international company like Yahoo! takes a long time to do anything. Apple may have looked into buying Konfab but they were already in talks with Yahoo. With lawyers, due diligence, financial disclosure, negotiating, etc... it could take several years even to buy a small company. So, Apple was locked out and just decided to do it themselves.
Also, maybe they also thought "For once, why don't we steal from someone instead of the other way around? It seems to work wonderfully when everyone steals our ideas..."
Sean
Reply
Daniel Flax said 2:15PM on 7-25-2005
I think Apple made the right move. I look at Dashboard as Desk Accessories 2k5. Konfab is a very good idea, that was/is difficult to code for. I'm certain that with the advent of Dashboard and the Yahoo aquisition, that will get much easier, but probably not as easy.
Dashboard widgets are trivial to make, Konfab stuff isn't (currently). Apple might have done the math of the purchase price + cost of tuning Konfab to fit into the OS was more than building from scratch. Right move, Apple.
As a share-holder... I applaud my company for doing the right (cost-effective) thing and not buying Konfab.
I seriously doubt any of the Konfab developers got hosed in all of this. I haven't seen the terms, but I'm sure Yahoo overpayed as usual and the Konfab folks are drinking $18 latte's while driving their Lamborghinis to their widget factory!
Reply
Tony said 2:23PM on 7-25-2005
simon saunders,
I'm not sure I comprehend your convoluted statement about Flickr.
Yahoo bought them. Some time later, they automatically extended Pro-level account by an extra year, and gave each Pro member 2 Pro-level accounts to gift to friends. What's more, they notified the Pro members by email, and also through the notifications within flickr (both in the Flickr mail, and on EVERY PAGE where it prompts you to give out those accounts).
So, what is "under the radar" about that, exactly?
Reply
Maha10k said 2:32PM on 7-25-2005
It's not a misake at all. I didn't upgrade to Tiger for Dashboard. Konfabulaor isn't even original technology so why should Appple buy them?
http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/dashboard_vs_konfabulator
I like the fact the widgets run in the background. The overwhelming presence of windows on my limited desktop space (PB15) isn't helped by tossing the 5 or so widgets into the mix.
Yahoo widgets are just another app to consider downloading. Upgrading to Tiger is a different consideration.
Reply
Jerid Hill said 2:32PM on 7-25-2005
These are two different processes to get the same results.
Konfabulator uses a custom XML format running javascript, while Dashboard uses html, css and javascript. Intel reverse engineered their chips and couldn't get into any type of trouble for it. If Apple did reverse engineer it, which we are not sure they did, then they too would be free from a lawsuit. With the widgets using html, css and js, these are pretty much creatible by anyone who knows how to design a web page. You can use cocoa as well for things javascript might not be able to handle.
You can also run Konfabulator and open up your process panel and find out that most of the widgets created take up as much memory as full blown Mac apps. Whereas widgets for the Mac OS don't.
Reply
Kevin Ballard said 2:32PM on 7-25-2005
Apple most certainly should not have bought Konfabulator, or paid Konfab's authors anything. Konfabulator was a poorly-implemented resource hog, and Apple is not in the business of paying people for ideas.
Reply
Alex Payne said 2:47PM on 7-25-2005
I'm with Kevin, above. Konfabulator was a miserable implementation of an idea that's been floating around for ages. Apple's own implementation, in Dashboard, was not a significant improvement, however.
Reply
Jay Contonio said 3:01PM on 7-25-2005
I think Apple made a mistake putting dashboard in the OS. They should've bought konfab and then hit command-delete on all the source. Widgets suck. A lot.
Reply
Scott Gardner said 2:58PM on 7-25-2005
I haven't used Konfabulator, really. Well, I downloaded it to my VPN'd PC at my employer (I work remotely), but because I have the color settings low to promote faster operation, the Konfab widgets don't look all that good (graphic overlaps, illegible writing, etc.). Not their problem, of course, but just a prelim to my comment here. That said, I do not know the history of Apple Dashboard vs. Konfabulator, but I do think that the Dashboard functionality (in addition to being able to park Dashboard Widgets on the Desktop, too) adds considerable benefits to the whole Widget thing. So, I think of Yahoo!'s acquisition and marketing of Konfabulator as a form of marketing for Apple's Dashboard, i.e., if you like Yahoo! Widgets, you'll *LOVE* Dashboard. My concern is that, in the same vain that developers have focused more so on PC/Windows due to the audience size, I hope Widget developers will continue to develop for Dashboard. Or, I wonder if some rocket-scientist-type will come out with a Yahoo! Widget to Dashboard Widget Converter? Hello Rosetta, there'a a freebie for you!
Reply