Misguided iPhone/Safari strategy analysis

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.