| Sunday, February 9, 2003 |
13:08 - Throwing stones in Plexiglas houses
http://daringfireball.net/2003/02/operatic.html
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There's been a bit of a flap this past week over the news (reported on CNet News) that Opera, the big "alternative" browser maker that prides itself on being fast, full-featured, and cross-platform, is all miffed over Apple's release of Safari. Opera has apparently reacted by planning to cancel the Mac version of their browser.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball has a good response to Opera's take-their-ball-and-go-home whining. It's more lengthy, anyway, than Dave Hyatt's response, which (at the time) was simply "Wah".
Gruber makes the point that Apple's releasing home-grown offerings to compete with third-party products is a wholly defensible policy from a business standpoint, and IE (their previously bundled browser) just wasn't cutting it; Apple had to jump ship and get into the browser business, or be forever relegated to second-class status on the Internet. That's what happens when your flagship software is produced by a company who has a business incentive to make it suck.
Apple's been taking heat for its decision to release Sherlock as part of Jaguar, effectively stealing the steam from Watson (of which it is effectively a clone, in functionality and architecture). No matter how sound a business case Apple may have had for such a move, it still wasn't very nice; Karelia had every right to get pissed at Apple, accuse them of Microsofting themselves, and make noises about taking Watson to Windows. But in the end, they did what I think is right: they've forged ahead and set to work making Watson more than it was before, keeping it ahead of the Sherlock curve. That's how you stay in business, if your business case is founded on providing a product which adds functionality to a platform whose maker is totally free to add that functionality itself.
But as far as web browsers go, Opera doesn't have much of a leg to stand on. Hyatt says:
Did Opera expect some sort of prize just for showing up? Any Mac user could tell you that just showing up is not enough. Nobody wants an afterthought for a browser, or a second-rate knockoff of your shining Windows star.
Indeed. I've never used Opera on the Mac; I only briefly used it on Windows, back when it had a horrifying MDI interface and no Java. They were small and scrappy then, and Opera looked like the pure and noble alternative to both the IE juggernaut and the Netscape mutant-beast. But it didn't last long; I couldn't sustain my patience, and Opera has been doing its developing without my attention. I hadn't in fact realized that there was a Mac version.
I really like Apple's response to Opera's jab:
"We think Safari is one of the best and most innovative browsers in the world, and it seems our customers do too," the Mac maker said in a statement. "No one is making Mac users choose Safari over Opera--they're doing it of their own free will--and Opera's trashing of Safari sounds like sour grapes to us."
Phew. Who put Donald Rumsfeld in charge of Apple PR?
Anyway, Gruber then makes an interesting point about Apple and success, and how Apple can get away with acting like a bastard toward third-party developers-- indeed, how it can continue to act as though it's a success, dictating business on its own terms, rather than desperately taking whatever it can get as cast-offs from the big-boys' table. It's because they are successful.
"Computer industry experts" (where by "computer industry" I mean "Wintel", and by "experts" I mean tech journalists and industry analysts) seldom understand the reason for the Mac's success. In fact, they don't even see the Macintosh as a successful platform, because they approach it from a Microsoft/Intel perspective.
But it is successful. It's been around for nearly 20 years, and it is going strong. Millions of happy, devoted customers. And Apple has been largely profitable. The only way to see the Mac as unsuccessful is to compare it to Windows on Microsoft's terms -- market share and raw profit. And that's exactly how analysts and the PC press cover the Mac.
What they miss is that the Mac's primary purpose is to be better. Windows's primary purpose is to be ubiquitous. Both platforms have been successful in achieving these goals. That's not to say they're mutually exclusive. Apple would of course love to achieve higher market share. Love love love. And Microsoft doesn't purposely make Windows uninintuitive. Well, maybe they do. But it's not as bad as it used to be.
Apple's problem is that it's hard to be better. As it stands now, being "better" clearly means "better than Windows". When the same software exists for both Mac and Windows, Apple has no advantage. When Photoshop was Mac-only, this was a huge advantage for Apple.
To be better requires Mac-only software that works better than its Windows counterparts. Thus, Mozilla offers no advantage whatsoever to Apple. Chimera offers some. But Safari offers quite a bit, and has the potential for even more.
Apple's lost a lot of the bullet points that we used to use to list what made the Mac superior; I can't help but be wistful when I look back on the days of the Mac-only Photoshop. It's nowhere near as easy to convince people of the Mac's advantages by pointing out the ugliness of Photoshop's MDI box as it was to point out the abject lack of Photoshop's existence on Windows.
So they've had to keep reinventing the Mac; lately it's been the whole digital media "thing", and for a while Apple was far-and-away the leader with that. They've still got a massive entrenched base in film and A/V, and iLife (iMovie 3's bugginess notwithstanding) is a solid offering-- and combined with guaranteed built-in FireWire and the iPod, it's a Complete Lifestyle Solution-- but that's not going to last forever. Microsoft has very nearly pulled all the pieces together so as to make the same stuff available on Windows; and what Microsoft doesn't provide, HP and Sony and Intel and Creative and the rest provide in their own third-party way. Apple's going to have to branch out again.
They sort of missed the "integrated web services" boat, back in 1998 when it was really taking off. With Microsoft's relationship with the Mac sort of up in the air, with the now-infamous deal-with-the-devil by which Jobs would accept $150 million and a guarantee to keep Mac Office in production, in exchange for the promise to bundle IE-- Microsoft's second-rate Mac version of IE-- instead of Netscape... it meant that the Mac would never have the whole browser-centric OS interface that Windows has now, whether Apple wanted it or not. It's still arguable whether it was a good idea in the long run. But whether it was or not, the Mac is still much less "webby" than Windows is. And perhaps that's what Safari and WebCore are all about.
If so, it means they're playing catch-up, not striking out into new territory. I don't quite know what Jobs has in mind for the Safari team. I'm sure there's some master plan, and I'm sure it'll turn into something massively cool sooner or later. I just don't know what.
But what all this proves, and what Hyatt (speaking for himself, not as an Apple employee) and Gruber have elucidated, is that Apple has breathing room. They can afford to throw their weight around a bit. They're not hanging on by their fingernails; they're healthy enough to experiment. Their risk-taking isn't out of desperation; it's still out of the genuine desire to innovate; and as long as they're a minority, that desire to innovate can't reasonably be mistaken for cold-hearted selfishness and monopolistic paranoia, which is the usual assumption with Microsoft.
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