My biggest takeaway from the article was this:

“The site never would’ve taken off without the passion and knowledge that I have for the books,” he says. “That comes before the business.”

Something I’ve learnt over the past few months is to only attempt to get into business with something you’ve got a passion for, and a good deal of knowledge and credibility about. Sometimes you choose a business because you’ve got a hot idea, or it’s a great sector to get into. Neither of these motivations are wrong at all, but often they aren’t sufficient (or necessary).

We’re seeing a dramatic democratization of the Web. With the first-generation Web, we first became aware of the power of information. With the next generation, we saw traditional media move online (mostly print media) and replicate more or less the same real-world model online. Finally, a couple of years ago, tools and services that put publishing power in the hands of individuals completely changed the rules of the game. We went from information to analysis, and from analysis to opinions. Influential individuals built up a readership that only Big Media once enjoyed.

That influence and readership created something that’s caused the paradigm shift in PR that Steve’s talking about – and that something is transparency. We aren’t dealing with mere articles with faceless journalists behind them; we’re dealing with real people, real opinions, and are forming real relationships and influence-hierarchies online. This transparency turns PR on its head:

One, information is too freely available for anything but the truth to sustain itself.

Two, once the audience interacts with personalities online, they’ll only accept real, frank, objective dialogue. Standard stuffy, stodgy press releases, declarations and advertisements just won’t make the cut. What you tell your audience has to be what you truly feel, mean, and do.

In a nutshell, Cringely believes that forcing developers to develop Safari-compliant AJAX applications will aid simlilar Safari-compliant applications on the iPhone (now that Steve Jobs has declared that third-party applications will be overwhelmingly web-based):

With the AJAX economy dictating that browsers with big market share like IE and Firefox get most of the effort, that leaves Safari as a second-class browser and, potentially, a liability for the iPhone.

Whaddayado? Introduce a Windows version of Safari, get a million people to download it in the first week, and scare developers into moving Safari customization higher on their AJAX priority list.

Non. That’s shockingly naive. The bottom line is that Safari just doesn’t matter. A million downloads in the first week (and projecting forward from there) isn’t even a microscopic scratch on the total number of IE and Firefox browsers surfing the Internet. Half of Google’s applications don’t work well with Opera yet – and it’s a browser which has a substantial number of users, most of whom are more likely to be heavy users of Google’s application services.

Besides, how long has Safari for Windows been around? 3 weeks? And it’s about another week to the iPhone launch. That’s simply not long enough to gain traction. For Safari to make any sort of difference, it’d have to be launched at least a year ago, and promoted heavily by Apple, a la
the community effort by the Firefox junta.

So why launch Safari for Windows after all? It’s simpler than most commentators are making it out to be. Hark back to my post last Friday. The iPhone is cool enough for developers to want to develop applications for it anyway. Safari for Windows gives them a browser to test compatibility on with without having to invest in iPhones and/or Macbooks. Jobs stressed in his Walt Mossberg interview at the D conference about the OS and browser being the same Mac applications:

.. It’s REAL Safari, REAL OS X. We put a different user interface on it to work with a multi-touch screen… it’s an amazing amount of software.

It’s about dramatically lowering the entry barrier for developers to write applications for the iPhone, not compelling them to be compliant with Safari on Windows.

First, Dvorak’s take on the browser strategy is the same as mine (read yesterday’s post):

“… this particular browser is necessary if anyone wants to develop applications for the iPhone. Apparently, third-party iPhone applications will be nothing more than browser-based applications running on the Safari browser… Apple seems intent on locking down the iPhone to real application development, where programmers can actually go into the phone’s software and fiddle with whatever they want. The company is keeping all that power to itself.”

He also offers another interesting perspective on why the Search era could have opened up a new revenue stream for browser makers:

Steve Jobs admitted at the D conference that Apple was rather cagey about allowing developers to write third-party apps to run on the iPhone:

This is an important tradeoff between security and openness. We want both. We’re working through a way… we’ll find a way to let 3rd parties write apps and still preserve security on the iPhone. But until we find that way we can’t compromise the security of the phone.

That caused an angry wave of comments condemning Apple for alienating developers all over again (remember, lack of developer support is now the “accepted” reason for the failure of Apple’s original Macintosh computers). Scoble points out that Jobs “is not an idiot”, and that, in time, Apple will open up its iPhone:

So, what do I think will happen? Oh, I can see the Steve Jobs keynote in 2008 right now. “We’ve sold eight million iPhones, more than we expected” and “remember how I said iPhone apps needed to be done with JavaScript and HTML? Well, we heard from all of you that you wanted to play games on Pogo.com so we added Flash. And we’ve been working on our own iPhone applications for more than a year now and we’re sharing the developer tools we use internally.”

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But he’s probably wrong there. Steve Jobs is betting heavily on the Web. And Safari. Take a look at these comments from his interview with Walt Mossberg at D5:

The second reason (why Cingular invested in Apple’s iPhone) is more profound: they have spent and are spending a fortune to build these 3G networks, and so far there ain’t a lot to do with them. People haven’t voted with their pocketbooks to sign up for video on their phones. These phones aren’t capable of taking advantage of it. Youv’e used the internet on your phone, it’s terrible! You get the baby internet, or the mobile internet — people want the REAL internet on their phone. We are going to deliver that. We’re going to take advantage of some of these investments in bandwidth.

and, if that wasn’t enough,

… It’s REAL Safari, REAL OS X. We put a different user interface on it to work with a multi-touch screen… it’s an amazing amount of software.

Clearly, (notwithstanding Cringely’s comments today about AT&T’s bandwidth crunch), Jobs is encouraging developers to build web-based applications for mobile Safari making use of the high-speed 2.5G and Wifi networks that are near-ubiquitous in the US now (and Europe. And far-East Asia). That way, Jobs gets to have his cake and eat it too. And now you see the reasoning behind the strange release of Safari on Windows. (Getting developers to get their application services render well on Safari – REAL Safari, remember?)

Search is no longer the dominant paradigm. The future of the web is about personalization. Where search was dominant, now the web is about ‘me.’ It’s about weaving the web together in a way that is smart and personalized for the user.

Some companies do learn fast! And, after this prediction and Cringely’s endorsement of my concerns about Google, you know where to turn to for technology strategy and trends!