Safari: Apple’s New Platform?

Yesterday’s announce­ment of Apple launch­ing it’s Safari web browser for the win­dow plat­form was a bit puz­zling and I wasn’t sure of what to make of it at first. So I decided to read more about it and then install it.

Of course, day one is always amus­ing. First, it’s clear that the secu­rity claims are not fully jus­ti­fied. And mov­ing from the con­fines of the OSX world, which is gen­er­ally like a metic­u­lously cleaned up sub­ur­ban neigh­bor­hood into the wilds known as the world of Win­dows was bound to test some of Apple’s met­tle when it comes to secu­rity. But that’s really besides the point: the soft­ware is not a full released ver­sion and one can hope that it will be improved upon fur­ther down the line (then again, hope springs eternal.)

But all this is really besides the point. In order to see what is hap­pen­ing, one must start think­ing about why would Apple think about a new browser today.

The first pop­u­lar line is that it works as a good envi­ron­ment for devel­op­ing appli­ca­tions for the iPhone, now that Steve Jobs has stated that this would be the only way devel­op­ers can cur­rently develop for that new device. GigaOm believes that AJAX will change the way mobile devices appli­ca­tions are devel­oped. I’m not sure I share Om’s enthu­si­asm for that approach: for starters, the sys­tem sports WiFi and EDGE but no higher speed wire­less net­work. So, unless you’re near a WiFi hotspot (and I’m sure one was avail­able for Steve Jobs’ pre­sen­ta­tion), you may find respon­sive­ness slug­gish. Small amounts of data are OK when run­ning on an EDGE net­work but the startup for a new AJAX-powered appli­ca­tion will prob­a­bly be on the slower side. How­ever, hav­ing denied access to the core sys­tem on the iPhone to devel­op­ers (as it did for the iPod), Apple had to toss them a bone and Safari was that bone. That bone is called Safari.

The next chal­lenge for Apple was that, while a lot of devel­op­ers use OSX, the major­ity of devel­op­ment is still not hap­pen­ing on their plat­form. In fact, more energy is expanded in the web devel­op­ment com­mu­nity to mak­ing sure that some­thing works with the Fire­fox browser than is to make sure that it works with the Safari browser. By now swing­ing the tan­ta­liz­ing car­rot of iPhone cool­ness, Apple is mak­ing sure that more devel­op­ers ensure their sites work with Safari. From that sense, it avoids future prob­lems with some of their mac users being unhappy with the fact that some sites don’t work on Safari, blam­ing Apple for it instead of the site’s devel­op­ers, and it cre­ates a new plat­form for itself: develop some­thing on Safari and it will run on macs, win­dows, and the iPhone.

Apple is basi­cally push­ing Safari as a new plat­form, bor­row­ing a strat­egy that was first high­lighted by Marc Andreesen almost 15 years ago: back in the day, Marc stated that he wanted Netscape to replace win­dows or just turn it into a set of basic com­po­nents with every­thing run­ning into the browser. Of course, this was at a time when you were lucky if you had a 56k modem so it didn’t make much sense then. In a world where band­width is high enough, appli­ca­tions can now resides largely on the net­work so Apple push­ing Safari as a new plat­form could make some degree of sense.

The next step to think of is that while an appli­ca­tion may make sense in terms of run­ning fully online, even Google has seen some of the lim­i­ta­tions of that model. Their offer­ing of the Google Gears showed that they are inter­ested in mov­ing some of their appli­ca­tion to an envi­ron­ment where a net­work con­nec­tion is not required 100 per­cent of the time.

So Apple’s strat­egy would require a way for Apple to ensure that things can be installed locally within Win­dows. This is where some­thing that was not men­tioned by the folks at Apple is show­ing up when you install Safari:

Now that’s very inter­est­ing. Why would Apple be so inter­ested in installing those two pieces of soft­ware on your com­puter? After all, they are not nec­es­sary for devel­op­ing appli­ca­tions for the iPhone. But before going into spec­u­la­tions as to why they are there, let me explain what those two appli­ca­tions do:

• Bon­jour, accord­ing to Wikipedia, is “Apple’s imple­men­ta­tion of Zero­Conf,” a tech­nol­ogy that allows inex­pert users to con­nect com­put­ers, net­worked print­ers, and other items together and expect them to work automatically.
• Soft­ware update, also accord­ing to Wikipedia, installs the lat­est ver­sion of Apple soft­ware on a com­puter. It was first intro­duced on the Win­dows plat­form as part of iTunes.

The pres­ence of those two pack­ages higlights that Apple is not just inter­ested in the desk­top but wants to play within a wider environment:

One can assume that Bon­jour might be embed­ded in the iPhone and AppleTV as well as future ver­sion of the iPod. This would basi­cally hit right at the heart of Microsoft’s strat­egy of cre­at­ing a dis­trib­uted envi­ron­ment where the Xbox, Win­dows Media Cen­ter, and other Win­dows pow­ered devices are all inter­con­nected. Apple would now enter that world and get all their stuff also con­nected on Microsoft’s turf.

The pres­ence of soft­ware update, while not fully mined yet, could be equiv­a­lent to Google Pack, which also hap­pens to include the Google Updater, which Google describes as fol­lows:

The Google Updater is the pro­gram that down­loads and installs all the soft­ware in the Google Pack. You can use the Google Updater to mon­i­tor the sta­tus of your instal­la­tion, run soft­ware that’s been installed, or unin­stall soft­ware. A Google Updater icon will appear in your sys­tem tray and will dis­play noti­fi­ca­tions when new soft­ware is available.

With that in place, the win­dows desk­top is increas­ingly look­ing as a new bat­tle­ground. On one site you’ve got the incum­bent, with Win­dows Update, then you have the new claimants to the throne in the form of Google and Apple. Right now, Apple is actu­ally start­ing to push new prod­ucts with the Apple Soft­ware Update: installing the new Safari soft­ware on a vir­gin machine (ie. one with­out any Apple soft­ware update) yielded the fol­low­ing Soft­ware Update Window:

So I install a browser and the next thing Apple is telling me is that I should really con­sider installing iTunes and Quick­time. What next? This is obvi­ously a good deliv­ery vehi­cle for Apple to push more soft­ware down the lines.

So they’re devel­op­ing their own eco-system right on top of Win­dows. In a way, one could think that they are basi­cally tak­ing the same approach as Microsoft did with the Office plat­form: Develop on some­one else’s turf but also opti­mize for your own.

It’s a bril­liant strate­gic move and one that could even­tu­ally yield to much more soft­ware com­ing from Apple to the Win­dows platform.

So why would Apple care about Windows?

Well, beyond the basic point that there are more Win­dows users than there are mac users is the fact that Apple is work­ing on set­ting up new ecosys­tems for itself. The iPod was the first obvi­ous move in that direc­tion and they are bet­ting that the iPhone will be a sim­i­lar win­ner for them. Ear­lier this year, when Steve Jobs intro­duced the iPhone, he also dropped the word com­puter from the name of the com­pany. Apple’s future is not in the com­puter space (and it is appears the com­pany is run­ning out of new ideas for its oper­at­ing sys­tem as the new OS fea­tures pre­sented in yesterday’s keynote were incre­men­tal at best) but in the con­sumer elec­tron­ics space. They hope to con­trol what’s in your hands (iPod, iPhone), what’s on your screen (iTV, iTunes) and how you access the con­tent. By hav­ing con­trol to the access point, Apple can then influ­ence the pric­ing mod­els in the deliv­ery of media and ensure they take their own per­cent­age along the way: it’s some­thing that worked for them in the music space, some­thing they’re work­ing on in the video space, and I sus­pect some­thing they’ll even­tu­ally look into in the soft­ware space.

Apple wants to con­trol the points of entry and charge a fee for access to them (fur­ther high­light­ing that point is this blog entry by Larry Dig­nan at ZDnet, which high­lights that Apple is get­ting some nice rev­enue from Google and Yahoo). All and all, Apple could even­tu­ally suc­ceed on grounds that Microsoft once wanted to claim as its own: to become the toll­booth to the Inter­net and the new world of media.