Multithreaded

This is just awe-inspiring (for any self-respecting geek, that is)

That was an interesting move by Apple at the WWDC yesterday, making Safari available on Windows. There seem to me to be a couple of good reasons for this:

Firstly, on June 29th the iPhone will be released (in the US at least, we Apple fanboys in the rest of the world will have to wait a little longer to get our hands on one) and a million or so people, not just Mac users, will be buying them over the next few months. Of course, Safari is the browser on the iPhone. Not a cut-down, limited version of Safari, but the full Safari 3. All at once there is the possibility of running the exact same browser on your Mac, your PC and your phone. Bringing Safari to Windows gives all the non-Mac iPhone users an opportunity to have the same browsing experience on their desktop, laptop and mobile phone.

That’s the short-term reason I see. The second, longer-term, reason is that this is giving more ‘ice water to someone in hell’ as Steve Job’s commented when asked why iTunes was so popular on Windows. Making Safari available is another way of giving Windows users a little more taste of what the Mac experience is like. A lot of long-term Windows users have no idea how using a Mac is just different from using Windows. I certainly didn’t until I made the switch two-and-a-half years ago. I remember the excitement of realizing that this wasn’t simply the same ideas as Windows packaged differently, but that the whole approach was different. By making more of that available to the 93% or so of computer users who have never experienced a Mac, Apple will tempt a lot more of them to go for the full switch.

In the future I can see more and more of the core apps being ported over to Windows. Mail, Address Book and iCal would all sit very comfortably alongside iTunes and Safari. There’s no direct economic benefit, since they’ll all be free downloads, but the aim would seem to me to be to infiltrate the Windows territory, give a taste of what’s on offer and get people to switch. Apple currently has about 6% of the computer market. Currently they’re not aiming for 93%, they’re aiming for 10%. You can see that in the Mac/PC ads - they’re not designed to appeal to everyone, but they are designed to appeal to the next segment of users that Apple want to attract.

Apple clearly have a long-term strategy going here and seem to be very effective at executing it.