follow the money

There has been a bit of speculation on why Apple would want to introduce an internet browser for the PC market. On the face of it it is an odd decision, granted making a browser can be quite profitable if search engines are paying to be embedded, but I don't really think that is the reason.

My take on it, is that you need to follow the money. These days Apple is making a lot of money from things that are not actually Mac OS platform specific, the iPod works equally well for both PC and Mac, the iTunes site likewise, the iPhone does not require you to own an iMac.

Not only are these good revenue streams, but they probably have better margins, and a more realistic potential for a growing market. Even if Apple only manages to snag a small fraction of the mobile phone market the potential revenues are huge. People replace their mobile phones far more often than their desktops.

We are now entering the world of the post-pc gadget. Granted everyone will probably have a computer of some sort, but that is pretty much a commodity market now, people can get a laptop for a few hundred, and unless there are compelling reasons, then they will simply buy computers that only offer a tiny margin to the manufacturer. There is now little scope for compelling additional functionality to append to a computer, and it is not a highly visible object that you feel compelled to keep updated to be fashionable.

So if Apple wants to grow, then it will not be looking to sell more iMacs, or new operating systems, it will drive forward in the post-pc market, and find compelling ways of offering content online.

It is not inconceivable that the Mac OS might cease to be radically differentiated from any other operating systems, as more and more of our lives are lived via broadband, the amount actually residing on our hard drive is bound to diminish, so less applications on your desktop, and more as cloudware. The internet is driving our lives now, and as it is already operating system neutral.

In short, Apple operates in three realms,
hardware and associated software, the iMac, iLife,
cloudware like iTunes
post PC devices like the iPod and iTunes

the market they have been in longest, is not the one with the most potential, so why restrict your potential by tying in either your cloudware or post pc devices to the Apple OS and hardware, a PC version of Safari, is merely a component of this strategy.