This June: Apple will start selling software for Windows

Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited Vincent to write about innovative start ups based in the Netherlands, Apple, the media industry, incubators, business books and many other things that happen to interest him at the moment. Vince, they’re all yours!

You know, I always found it surprising that Apple started pre-announcing their products this year. What would be the business-sense for a company that has been doing so well in the rumour-market. Everyone was expecting Intel-Macs and Windows on Macs, but no one knew for sure. Everyone was expecting a media-console and an iPhone, but it was just a guess. Still, many of these products are becoming successful.

The iPhone is a different story though, entering a market that is saturated with phones that are cheaper or virtually free. Why enter such a market and why pre-announce it? It makes little business-sense to me, and I’m not alone.

But the mistake I made was to be blinded by the shiny device that Apple is throwing out there and seeing it as a stand-alone. Some of the biggest problems mentioned with the device was the saturated market and the fact that business-users, it’s primary market, would barely use it. And why would they, having already such brilliant (I exaggerate) integration of their existing devices with Microsoft’s suites?

If you remember, when the iPod launched, it wasn’t a big hit. The reason was because it was aimed at Mac-users. Apple got a clue though and as soon as it released software for Windows, the music-player soon became the hype. It is unlikely that they didn’t take this as a lesson for the future. Any device aimed at the Mac-market only, will only grab a tiny part of global market-share.

There is another piece of a puzzle that only Mac-users are likely aware of. The delay of the iWork and iLife-suities, which offer stuff like word-processing (Pages), presentations (Keynote), a speculated excel-app, an image manipulation app (iPhoto), iTunes, and Quicktime. This was expected at the beginning of this year, yet failed to show.

Now let’s think about this. Chances of mass-market adoption of a device aimed solely at Macs = low. Chances of the iPhone working flawlessly with existing Microsoft-solutions =  low to medium (at least according to the latest Microsoft-rant). Chances that iPhone will come with software for windows = your guess is as good as mine, but I think the chances are medium to high.

A final piece of the puzzle is perhaps that Apple is said to restrict software for iPhone, due to reasons of security. Opening up to the Windows-OS does pose a security-issue, I can imagine, and it’s possible that they want to close holes on that side as much as possible. Another possibility is spill-over effects from software-vendors learning to play on both sides of the fence and finally deciding to move to the much bigger and profitable market of Windows instead.

This is of course all speculation and I take absolutely no responsibility if you or your business starts pre-ordering iPhones now!