Leopard learner or Vista victim?
There is another reason for Apple to port Safari to Windows. Come October, consumers who are still using Windows XP will have two options: clunk another PC under the desk and start learning Vista’s idiosynchracies, or set a sharp looking Mac on top and learn OS X. The trouble is, people remember how hard it was to learn “computers” the first time and so are hesitant to try their luck a second time. Different may mean better, and “Think different” might have made Mac users feel good, but to most people different just means unfamiliar.
Beyond e-mail, digital photos, movies, and music, users are spending most of their voluntary “computer time” on the Web. With iTunes, Apple already has the best music and movie player on Windows. If Apple can get people to use Safari, they eliminate one more unfamiliarity. What’s left? After porting two full-featured applications, it should be a cinch to make Mail.app work on the Windows side. If users know how all their music, their websites and their e-mail will work in OS X, there will be no good reason to choose Vista over Leopard. Looking through files with Finder is just like using iTunes, iPhoto is the true Picasa, and just about everything else is spectacularly better. That one last Windows app you can’t live without might not work in Vista, but it will run in Parallels Classic Coherence mode.
Today’s Leopard demonstration didn’t shatter the world with a multitouch, mind-activated six-dimensional spatial zoom interface. It was one small step for Mac, but it will encourage a giant leap for many potential switchers. If the biggest difference between Windows and OS X is that Leopard offers a friendly, familiar and amazingly rich operating system, while Vista is Apple’s previous operating system crammed into a Start menu and a bunch of annoying dialogs….that’s not such a bad market for Apple developers to be in.
Edit: Brian Christiansen re¢ently made this argument more succintly: “Pretty soon, when you’re running four or five Apple apps a day, using your iPod and/or iPhone… when it comes time to buy a new computer, suddenly running the Apple OS behind your Apple apps isn’t so foreign. [...] If you’ve been using iTunes for years and sit down on a Mac for the first time, everything is going to be eerily intuitive.”