Safari on Windows - where is this going?

At the D5 conference, Walt Mossberg asked Steve Jobs about iTunes on Windows. Steve Jobs said there have been hundreds of millions of downloads of iTunes for Windows, to which Mossberg said "that makes Apple one of the larger vendors of Windows software." Given today's announcement about Safari on Windows, you almost wonder if Mossberg's question at D5 was a plant.

While Safari on Windows is a neat idea, you have to wonder what Apple is trying to get out of it. iTunes on Windows is a no-brainer - that's the only way to shop the iTunes store, so Apple clearly makes money on it. But what do they get out of porting Safari? Are they trying to take control of the de facto web standards? No, certainly not. In order to do that they would have to (a) take substantial market share from Internet Explorer, which is something that Mozilla hasn't been able to do in 10 years. And (b) they would then also have to wrest enough market share from Firefox so that Apple could dictate standards. Not only is that not going to happen, it's not even worth fighting for, because the RIAs are coming (i.e. Flex, Silverlight, and whoever else jumps into that ring.)

It seems more likely that in the near future, .Mac is going to gain some new capabilities, and even though it will remain cross-browser, I suspect you'll see the really super whiz-bang extras only work with Safari. Since Safari now runs on Windows, this makes every Windows user a potential .Mac customer. When they see their friend with the Macintosh using the super cool .Mac whiz-bangery, some small percentage of them will go ahead and sign up. And as the Long Tail tells us, the Internet is so damn big that a small percentage of any global market returns big bucks. In short, Safari is about to become the loss leader for .Mac in the same way that iTunes is the loss leader for the iTunes store.

If this plays out like Apple wants it to, not only will it grow .Mac revenues, it will also continue to grow the halo effect.

I mentioned this to a couple people and they considered this strategy to be a stretch. And they're right, it is. But it's a stretch that incurs almost no risk to Apple. With iTunes and Boot Camp, Apple has fostered a group of veteran in-house Windows developers. Porting Safari was not a large investment. If Windows users start buying .Mac, hurray, if not, nothing is lost.