Safari on Windows? Hell freezes over again…

Had a discussion on this at work this week.. I figured I’d pull some of what I wrote out and post it here…

(someone else)

I remember when Apple came out with iTunes for Windows….headline on apple.com was “Hell has frozen over” (I think that Steve Jobs may have said something previously about “hell freezing over” before Apple produces any windows products — Chuq maybe you have some visibility there?)

Anyway, I think it’s ironically cool that they are now getting into the windows browser market

(me)

Actually, steve DID use the “hell has frozen over” phrase, which pissed off some conservative school board in Virginia who threatened to pull all their contracts, so it died a quick death… Almost as much fun as Bob Dylan suing Apple for using him in the “Think Different” ads (if you have a Dylan Think Different poster, it’s worth money; so is the Dalai Lama, which got pulled when the Chinese Government had a cow)

Apple stopped trying to “beat” Microsoft long ago. Now, the strategy is clearly to overlay it in ways that allow Apple to control the important parts – putting iTunes on Windows lets them sell a zillion iPods (Steve mentioned something to the effect of 1 million iTunes downloads a DAY today; also, with Boot Camp (apple’s version), Parallels and VMWare, we can now run windows on Apple hardware (and I do, it works pretty well), so Apple’s now selling lots of hardware to folks who want having Mac OS around, but NEED windows and don’t want twelve computers around… And Apple hardware is a good margin business. Finding ways to “win” without going head to head in a battle you’ll lose by changing the rules of the game.

Increasingly it’s the browser that matters in a user’s interface, not the underlying OS, so if Apple and put Safari on windows, they can more or less take over control of the user’s experience from Microsoft, on a Microsoft OS.

On top of that, he announced they’re opening up iPhone to developers – and that they’re doing it with Web applications and web programming; i.e., if you write it for safari, it’ll work on your mac, your iPhone, and now, your windows box. So Safari is going to be the core of supporting iPhone on windows, I think, the way iTunes is the core of supporting iPod on Windows – meaning having a windows box is going to be no reason NOT to buy an iPhone.

Neat strategy, IMHO, if I’ve read the plan properly.

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