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Apple’s Safari Push is Not About the Money

Apple has been causing a stir with its heavy-handed tactics for pushing Safari onto Windows users. Those who have iTunes, whether or not they have ever installed Safari, are apparently getting an automatic update dialog proposing to “upgrade” to the latest versions of both products. Reactions range from that of Mozilla CEO John Lilly, who says that Apple’s betrayal of its users’ trust is “wrong” because it harms the image of software makers everywhere, to any number of Apple fanboy blogs that defend the action because (and I paraphrase) who would protest to being tricked into downloading a new browser when it’s so much better than what you have right now? Save me a tall cold glass of that tasty kool-aid, would you?

Alright, Apple’s action is dastardly and underhanded, but then corporations have done much worse in the service of their strategic goals. A much more interesting question is why Apple considers it strategic to drive adoption of its browser so aggressively among Windows users. Larry Dignan presents what is frankly a rather artless take: it’s all about the money. Ironically, Larry undermines his whole arguments when he observes (correctly) that “Google’s fees to Apple aren’t likely to be material.” Understatement of the year, when you consider that Mozilla’s Firefox revenues (with four times the market share of Safari) for the entire year of 2007 are probably not much more than what Apple books every day.

Matt Asay’s explanation makes a lot more sense:

[Safari is] a great browser but…who cares? It doesn’t provide any differentiation that Internet Explorer or Firefox don’t already provide.

Except for its tie to the iPhone, of course. Safari is the application platform Apple uses for its iPhone. Why should Apple care about which browser you use? Because it cares about which phone you use. Apple won’t sell a single license to Safari, but it’s definitely hoping to sell you a boatload of iPhones.

But even this is an oversimplification. The real reason for Apple’s move is that it sees Safari as a strategic application platform on the whole range of computing devices, not just the iPhone. Despite continued gains in PC market share, its management realizes that they aren’t going to dislodge Windows from its entrenched position any time soon. So they are fighting to get more widespread deployment on Windows of their two application stacks, Cocoa and WebKit. It is a no-brainer that Apple is eventually going to launch some sort of Rich Internet Application platform, and overall market penetration of Safari will be a huge success vector. The hardest part of driving adoption of any new platform, after all, is getting your runtime onto the end user’s machine. Just ask Microsoft (.Net) and Sun (Java).

I like Matt Asay’s analysis because the iPhone is a significant part of this picture.  Mobile devices, game consoles and television sets will arguably be bigger targets for application deployment than traditional computers in as few years time. But the key message is not iPhone uber alles, but the need for Apple to get its runtime onto as many environments as possible to maximize economies of scale for application developers and cement its nascent but fast-growing control of the software development market.