Ice Water in Hell

A week or two ago, in discussing the success of iTunes on Windows, Steve Jobs describing giving iTunes to a Windows user as like "giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell." Today in the WWDC 2007 keynote we found out how Apple is going to build upon this concept in some interesting ways. Although the recent iTunes update turns out to have foreshadowed some of the Leopard user interface changes, what is more interesting relative to the ice water analogy is Safari and the iPhone.

Jobs suggested that the way to build an iPhone-compatible application is to use web standards and build an application that will run in Safari. At the same time, Apple surprised everyone and is delivering a beta of Safari that runs on Windows. What I find intriguing about this is that Apple may be able to leverage the iPhone's popularity (even though it isn't yet available) to get more people to adopt Safari on Windows.

Suppose you see the iPhone as a promising mobile platform, and you take Jobs' suggestion to build a web app for it. And suppose you are not a Mac developer/user. How can you test your iPhone app? Run Safari on Windows. I can see the iPhone causing a lot of Windows-using web developers to start using Safari. If Safari performs well on Windows, some of these users are going to switch to Safari in favor of the horrible IE and perhaps even Firefox. And whenever hellbound users drink ice water, they get a little taste of what it's like outside.

There's a separate issue about building a web app to achieve iPhone compatibility: Can you build an app that works when the user is not online? Many types of applications have no need to be connected to the internet. (Think of games, PDA applications, etc.) This need may spur more developers to start looking at technologies like Joyent Slingshot and Google Gears to see if they can be leveraged to work in the iPhone/Safari environment, where you get the application while connected (download on the iPhone in Safari), but use it entirely offline.