Some interesting news on the Watson Product FAQ:

Q. What are future plans for Watson?
A. [Updated July 1, 2004]
Sun Microsystems has made an agreement with Karelia Software for the technology in Watson. See the story here.

Watson was a great, Mac-specific app quickly done in by an "integrate into the OS" reminiscent of Microsoft and Internet Explorer when Apple added Sherlock to Macintosh (which has, in my experience, been horribly buggy at best on 10.2). Now Sun is creating/has created a Java version, and there are rumors it's going to be open sourced. That's great news for Java lovers. Will be interesting to see how that pans out -- I'm happy to see Sun do a great job attempting to pick up potentially great desktop apps and push them into Java.

Okay, well, this is the only one I know about, but it's good that they're starting somewhere. My biggest concern is this comment on the FAQ:

As part of the transition, Karelia is planning on having Watson reach its "end of life" on October 5, 2004. After this end-of-life date, Karelia will not be able to fully support and maintain Watson. (Between now and then, Watson will continue to be fully supported.) Hopefully, by that timeframe, Sun will have turned this project into a product that Watson users should be able to migrate to.

Does the author of Watson not know? Is there a chance it won't happen? That's strange to hear... A little more from the author here. A little bit about the Java port from its old manager here (yes, from another post, apparently this guy ain't on the project no mo'. Gotta love the flexibility of a corporation. Sheesh. Hate it.)

Btw, neat new find function in firefox 1.0. Very nice.