OS sellers also compete with other OS sellers, and have to keep adding features, or customers will stop buying their product.
For example: back in the 1970s, to draw bitmapped graphics, you used to have to buy a graphics drawing library, for a few hundred dollars. It likely shipped with fonts that you couldn’t use in a text processor that you had to buy from another vendor. The market for such products is a lot smaller today.
If you call any ‘adding a feature that you can buy from a third party’ Sherlocking, OS sellers cannot avoid being criticized:
- if they don’t add a feature, critics will say “why can’t their OS do FOO? You get that for free with Acme’s OS ”
- if they implement it in a basic way, they’ll say “their FOO can’t BAR”
- if they implement a competitive product they’ll say “Sherlocking”
⇒ I would limit “Sherlocking” to “largely the same feature with largely the same UI, and that UI isn’t obvious”