Seen Techmeme recently? If not, it’s been Applerific for 48 hours now, and only barely about the iPhone! Jobs announced Safari for Windows. My favorite quote so far comes from a commentor (gasp):
i suspect it’ll be bundled with itunes by default, set itself as the default browser, set quicktime as the default media player, and set your homepage to the mac store with an imac already in your shopping basket.
One day later, it’s hackable. Does that really surprise anyone? My hunch is its equally hackable on OSX, but thats not quite as newsworthy, is it?
I’m sure there’s some big long uber-strategy here, but I don’t see it. IE is not-so-great. Firefox is fine. Opera is fine. Do we need another browser? Especially the oh-so-mediocre Safari. Is this a “foot-in-the-door” strategy? Sure doesn’t seem that way.
Where’s iPhoto for Windows? Now THAT would be interesting, especially considering there’s no dominant photo app on the PC platform.
I’m 2 weeks into my Vista experience, and it’s clear to me that there’s plenty of opportunity for Apple to continue to outshine MS these days. I’m not even close to making the leap personally, although my “right-click outage” (it stopped working until I rebooted) was pretty darn frustrating. But bringing over the browser certainly doesn’t seem like the most obvious way in.
Movies! they wanna get movies installed and playable on the windoze machines, so they need a trojan horse to get quicktime on as many machines as they can. the 900 meeeliiion pcs that don’t currently have itunes installed.
IIRC the download offered safari with:
itunes
quicktime
itunes & quicktime.
I agree 100% that it’s not anything exciting, but I think I see something long term. There’s no arguing that OSX is prettier than windows. Every time Steve does a keynote about Leopard, I get excited, and I’m full-blown Windows.
But think of this – they’ve got Parallels, Bootcamp, and VMware. The lines between Mac and Windows are slowly blurring.
When you ask random people what’s the biggest reason they don’t switch OS’, it’s usually because they’re already seated in Windows. They don’t want the hassle of learning the new apps and UI of a new OS.
Enter iTunes for Windows, Safari, and I see more and more “Mac-only” things coming over. Jobs is giving people a way to “test” Mac out a bit before going headlong into it. That’s the biggest obstacle to switching OS.
There’s alot more to flesh out, but I don’t think this is happenstance and just something to reignite browser wars. This is a long, long term strategy.