samer/thoughts

This C|Net article is really the first inkling of what Apple's long term strategy might be. It is an interesting read, though I tend to take things that "analysts" say with a grain of salt.

Apple has already said that they plan on offering the store for Windows users. If reports are to be believed, it might well be a ported version of iTunes that Windows users will get to buy music with.

I hope this happens for a number of reasons that the C|Net article does point out. More importantly, it keeps Apple on its recent track of supporting standards and open source.

This raises some interesting questions. I've been looking at the way the music store works and based on some of the information online and what I've gleaned from looking at the traffic across my connection, it seems that -- surprise, surprise -- the music store is a WebObjects back end serving up XML. The interesting question: What will Apple do about processing the XML and accessing the web on Windows?

There has been some speculation about how closely the development of iTunes 4 and Safari are tied. I don't think that this is rampant useless debate.

If Safari came about because Apple needed a rendering engine for accessing the web, then what will they do about the Windows version? They are going to need something akin to WebCore or they can use IE's APIs. Ugh.

I suspect that Apple went with KHTML (the open source software that WebCore is based on) in part because they needed something blazingly fast. You really cannot afford to have a user waiting for many tens of seconds inside an application like iTunes. People are used to slow loading web pages, but they won't stand for an application that is slow and pokey.

I think Apple will choose to port WebCore to Windows in order to use it in iTunes on that platform. This should not be that hard, after all there already is a port of KHTML for Windows.

This is where it starts to get interesting.

Apple could, once iTunes is up and running, focus on producing Safari for Windows. There would be very little stopping them. The central parts would already be up and running, put a nice GUI around it and instantly blow past Microsoft's piss poor browser.

Apple is already convinced that Windows users are going to be a part of its future. They are making some inroads in the server market and in the scientific communities (which had almost abandoned Apple). Even my Windows centric company has purchased a number of Xserves.

The Switch campaign, the iPod for Windows, soon iTunes. Why not Safari? Open source code, coupled with standards based files and protocols all wrapped in Apple GUI goodness, technology savvy and marketing wizardry. Imagine the possibilities.