“In just a couple short years, assuming Apple achieves its internal goals for iPhone sales, there will actually be more iPhones on the planet than Apple computers. Developers don’t want to have to test their standards-compliant Web applications against an Safari for Macs and Safari for iPhones and Safari for Windows. They want to know that if they test against Safari — any Safari — that their Web application will work just fine, no matter what platform they run it on. Just like Apple today provides ‘Create once, listen or view anywhere’ audio and video media for iTunes, Apple wants the same experience for the Web using Safari,” Carl Howe writes for Blackfriars’ Marketing.
“This experience is something Microsoft can’t do, since it has trivial penetration of cell phone browsers (there are more Nokia browsers out there on phones than Microsoft ones by a factor of 10 or more), and has lost interest in supporting Internet Explorer on anything except Windows. And Firefox doesn’t run on phones. Only Apple has the kind of software development reach that can cover all the platform bases. And don’t be surprised if Apple reaches out to Red Hat or Canonical to see if they’d like to bundle Safari into their Linux distributions. The ability to develop for one standards-compliant browser is compelling, especially when we look at the ability to develop desktop widgets from browser pages. And as Jobs noted yesterday, Web pages are currently the only way developers can get applications onto the iPhone, so making that process easy is in Apple’s best interest, even if those developers are on Windows machines,” Howe writes.
“Safari for Windows is just a beta now. It clearly needs refinement and will undoubtedly have to have some security issues resolved it’s as secure as Firefox or Safari on Macintoshes. But it’s another marketing tool in Apple’s software offerings to draw Windows users and developers into the Apple environment. And even small success there can boost both the content and sales of Apple’s software and the iPhone — and that’s worth one to two billion dollars every quarter from 2008 on. That’s one heck of a lot of money and revenue for Apple from a free product,” Howe writes.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “LinuxGuy and Mac Prodigal Son” for the heads up.]