[wlesieutre]

Watson was an independent search application on Mac OS, until Apple basically photocopied it and named theirs Sherlock. Since then it's become a verb for when Apple takes your app and builds it into the OS.

Another blatant example was Dashboard, which copied Konfabulator, Night Shift is a copy of F.lux, etc.

[countvonbalzac]

I still use F.lux, it's much better than night shift IMO, just wish they had it for iOS.

[qubex]

When they demonstrated on-desktop widgets the other day, I thought to myself “there goes Konfabulator/Dashboard 2.0”, and then I thought to myself “you’re old enough to remember that and to be caustically cynical”.

[ladberg]

Technically Sherlock predates Watson, it's just a lot of the useful additional features added by Watson were copied to Sherlock.

[wlesieutre]

Ah you're right, it was Sherlock 3 that copied the Watson features. Mostly related to searching the web for things like ebay listings, recipes, stocks, software.

So the Watson name was probably inspired by Apple's from previous versions, but the Sherlock 3 feature set definitely got cloned from Karelia's.