Safari for Windows: free software that could generate billions for Apple

This morning the blogosphere is abuzz with people running the Safari 3.0 beta for Windows that Steve Jobs announced yesterday and finding various security exploits in it. Larholm.com claims he found a zero-day exploit, a security vulnerability that the vendor doesn't have a patch for, in two hours.. David Maynor over at Errata Security claims he's found six bugs in an afternoon. I'm sure we'll be seeing more reports as the days go on, and I have only one reaction:

Way cool. What you are doing -- do more of that. Safari needs to get better, because it's going to drive a lot of new Apple users in 2008.

Apple's strategy here is pretty clear. While many don't realize it, Apple already has a more than $1 billion a year software business. While many of those software packages are Mac-only, there are a couple of them that aren't: iTunes and Quicktime. Deployments of those two software packages exceed 300 million seats today and continue to grow. That makes Apple already one of the larger Windows software developers. And the more iTunes and Quicktime installs Apple gets, regardless of platform, the more revenue it makes at the iTunes store and via its Quicktime movie trailers. It further introduces Apple to a lot of users that normally would never consider an Apple product.

But why a browser now? Because it's a free software product that has a lucrative secondary revenue stream.

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball notes that Apple actually recognizes revenue from Google for every integrated search that comes from Safari. At the moment, that's about $25 million a year -- from the Mac-only version of Safari. But if Apple can reach a similar number of users that it has via iTunes, that number could increase by a factor of 5 to 10. And no matter how you slice it, a quarter billion dollars of search ad revenue is nothing to sneeze at, particularly from a free product.

Wait, there's more.

Browsers aren't just stand-alone applications that have a connection to one search engine. They drag along a lot of other bits of user experience, like home pages, media players, Web and font rendering engines, and even bits of networking code. So if Safari gets a foothold on Windows, we can expect more demand for iTunes and Quicktime downloads too. We might also see new Windows applications from Apple such as its Keychain for safeguarding user passwords and information and iChat messaging for Windows. So more use of Safari means more demand for other Apple software.

But the real driver here is a single browser platform across iPhones and the Web.

In just a couple short years, assuming Apple achieves its internal goals for iPhone sales, there will actually be more iPhones on the planet than Apple computers. Developers don't want to have to test their standards-compliant Web applications against an Safari for Macs and Safari for iPhones and Safari for Windows. They want to know that if they test against Safari -- any Safari -- that their Web application will work just fine, no matter what platform they run it on. Just like Apple today provides "Create once, listen or view anywhere" audio and video media for iTunes, Apple wants the same experience for the Web using Safari.

This experience is something Microsoft can't do, since it has trivial penetration of cell phone browsers (there are more Nokia browsers out there on phones than Microsoft ones by a factor of 10 or more), and has lost interest in supporting Internet Explorer on anything except Windows. And Firefox doesn't run on phones. Only Apple has the kind of software development reach that can cover all the platform bases. And don't be surprised if Apple reaches out to Red Hat or Canonical to see if they'd like to bundle Safari into their Linux distributions. The ability to develop for one standards-compliant browser is compelling, especially when we look at the ability to develop desktop widgets from browser pages. And as Jobs noted yesterday, Web pages are currently the only way developers can get applications onto the iPhone, so making that process easy is in Apple's best interest, even if those developers are on Windows machines.



Safari for Windows is just a beta now. It clearly needs refinement and will undoubtedly have to have some security issues resolved it's as secure as Firefox or Safari on Macintoshes. But it's another marketing tool in Apple's software offerings to draw Windows users and developers into the Apple environment. And even small success there can boost both the content and sales of Apple's software and the iPhone -- and that's worth one to two billion dollars every quarter from 2008 on. That's one heck of a lot of money and revenue for Apple from a free product.

Full disclosure: the author owns Apple shares at the time of writing.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Daring Fireball, David Maynor, Firefox, Google, John Gruber, Safari, Security, Windows, Windows Mobile