Many of you know that part of the happenstance of my coming to ESPN.com had to do with a set of tools I wrote for Watson, a web services client (of sorts) for Mac OS X. Well, Dan Wood revealed today that “a large company has licensed the Watson Technology from Karelia” and they’ll be releasing a new version soon. It looks like that company is Sun and the new release, Project Alameda, might be released as a Java application. This is incredible stuff, if true, because it opens up the market for Watson to the Windows world and makes it even more interesting to write plugins for it. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on this, so Dan, if you’re reading, gimme!

Update: So, among the updates from Apple at WWDC, Safari 2.0 will have an RSS aggregator built in. They also copied Konfabulator to some extent. While I’m happy that these things are free and part of the OS, I can’t help but wonder how Apple expects their platform to grow if they keep attacking their most popular consumer software developers… these independents are why I love the Mac community. Each time Apple comes out with something like this (Sherlock 3, anyone), it forces the dynamic and unique software industry around OS X to branch out or die. The Watson announcement above is an example… it’s great from my perspective as an employee of a company looking to get a single platform for all users, but it’s sad from my perspective as a consumer… one of the killer apps for my platform is, well, going away…

It’s not that Waston or something like it coming out for Windows is bad, it’s just sad that he had to rewrite it in Java to get something going on Windows because Apple tried to kill it on OS X.