Apple The Software Company Introduces Safari Browser

Now, now, just from the tiel, perhaps I will get razzed by Apple fans. Not to worry, this is intentional. Long before the iMac and the recent resurgence of Apple IT people have recognized that Apple is a software company.

You might state that there isn't a single Apple OS running on non-Apple hardware and you would only be partially correct.

Other companies make the hardware. Apple certainly helps with standards and requirements; however, it isn't Apple that makes these things.

Apple is known for - its operating system. Apple is known for - iTunes. Apple is known for - the user interface for the iPOD. They worked hard, no doubt on the design of the iPOD, but they don't build them.

So, the conclusion of Apple as a software company is almost complete with the release of the internet browser Safari.

Now, let me back up and say a few things:
1) I encouraged and bought my wife's MacBook when she was pregnant with our second child. So far she loves everything about it except the absence of quality games.

2) When my father-in-law was at the end of his latest porrly engineered PC, with our experiences with Apple computers, we got him the Mac Mini. It suits his purposes and even though he is older (78 years old or so) he found the transition not such a big deal.

3) I encourages and my wife bought an iPOD recently, even though she already had a competing MP3 player. Mostly so we can get the connector and control the iPOD directly from my wife's new minivan.

As soon as I heard about it, I downloaded and run sometimes the Safari browser on my Windows XP PC.

There are many great things about Apple as a software company. They are the only ones who have a chance at bringing a varient of Linux/Unix in as a popular operating system. They do good work that appears to not require as much patching as competing Microsoft products. This might in part be due to their control of the hardware side of the equation. The proliferation of even different motherboards can be cause for problems with Microsoft Windows operating systems.

However, ultimately, Apple fails as a software company in the one place where Microsoft shines as a software company - in the Development Environment. I'm an application developer and I've been writing programs for about 10 years. The Microsoft IDE, Visual Studio 2005, is a polished interface that makes writing a multitude of different programs easy and allows a proliferation of third-party software on the Windows PC.

My experience with the Apple development environment, was that it is at least 5 years (or more) behind the Visual Studio IDE. If Apple wants to sell more Apple operating system computers, they need to generate more third party software. A poor development environment just isn't going to do it.

The other major stumbling block to Apple OS computers and Apple's software failure, is the lack of VPN software. I'd love to change over to a Mac of some sort, but it simply isn't possible when the best Developer IDE exists on Windows OS and there simply isn't a way to do my work on an Apple machine.

If they want to boost their sales, Apple would invite Cisco over to create VPN software that works on the Apple OS.