Daily Archives: June 13, 2007

Thoughts about Safari

Yesterday, as I’m sure you’ve heard, Apple announced a version of Safari for Windows and also revealed that Safari will be the platform for app development on the iPhone.

Josh Catone on Read/Write Web has a good summary.

Understandably there has been a mixed reaction to these announcements.

Here are my random thoughts:

Safari is right on the brink of becoming a browser that web developers need to care about. This might be enough to make that happen. That would take the tally to four (including IE6, IE7, Firefox). It’s like the 90s all over again, which will come as a bit of a shock to developers who grew up in the Internet Explorer dominated era.

Some people have questioned who in their right mind would run Safari on Windows? That’s an easy one to answer: all of the Mac fanboys who are stuck using Windows PCs at work will (cough Amnon, cough Tim) and, I suppose, all of the Windows developers creating apps for the iPhone.

I agree with Jason from 37signals. Creating a separation between the platform (the physical phone and the browser) and the apps which third-party developers create is a smart move.

What do you think?

In the last 12 months Safari has grown from 1.1% market share to 2.1%. This is a simple result of selling more Macs. According to this recent Bloomberg report Apple now has 7.7% market share in desktops and just under 10% in laptops, which is a lot more than I would have guessed. So, what does the future hold for Safari?

And, related to this: what will happen to IE7? As I noted yesterday, it’s grown quickly to ~30% in the first half of this year, but seems to have stalled there.

Let’s hear your predictions for the next 12 months.

We’ll come back to them in a year and see who was closest.

Web 2.0: fizz or substance

Marc Andreessen has recently started his own blog.

An awseome addition to the conversation I’m sure you’ll agree.

One of his first posts is about Web 2.0.

He doesn’t seem to be a fan:

“Web 2.0 has been picked up as a term by the entrepreneurial community and its corollaries in venture capital, the press, analysts, large media and Internet companies, and Wall Street to describe a theoretical new category of startup companies.

Or a ‘space’, if you will.

As in, ‘Foobarxango.com is in the Web 2.0 space’.

At its simplest level, this is just shorthand to indicate a new Web company.

The technology industry has a long history of creating and naming such ‘spaces’ to use as shorthand.

Before the ‘Web 2.0 space’, you had the ‘dot com space’, the ‘intranet space’, the ‘B2B space’, the ‘B2C space’, the ‘security space’, the ‘mobile space’ (still going strong!)… and before that, the ‘pen computing’ space, the ‘CD-ROM multimedia space’, the ‘artificial intelligence’ space, the ‘mini-supercomputer space’, and going way back, the ‘personal computer space’. And many others.

But there is no such thing as a ‘space’.

There is such a thing as a market — that’s a group of people who will directly or indirectly pay money for something.

There is such a thing as a product — that’s an offering of a new kind of good or service that is brought to a market.

There is such a thing as a company — that’s an organized business entity that brings a product to a market.

But there is no such thing as a ‘space’.

And, as far as startups are concerned, there is no such thing as Web 2.0.”

This all doesn’t bode well for Brenda, Phil and Che, who will be the negative team in a celebrity debate that I’m going to be moderating at the next Webstock Mini on Tuesday 19th June.

If you’re going to be in Wellington make sure you book your tickets today and get along.

We’ll see you there!