Apple's path to domination: first web apps, then the world

In February, I wrote about Apple’s updates to Safari:

Apple is positioning Safari as the premier platform for web applications. They’ve got something up their sleeve, with last year’s port of Safari to Windows and with MobileSafari on the iPhone — should be fun to find out what it is.

Daniel Eran of RoughlyDrafted.com may have the answer:

Apple is refining Cocoa for deployment within the web browser to enable developers to build those so called “Rich Internet Applications” that Adobe wants users to build in Flash/Flex/AIR, Microsoft in Silverlight, Sun in Java, and so on.

I’m not sure how or why Eran is reporting all of this as fact, but this is a really intriguing idea — that Apple may be positioning Cocoa, its primary OS X application coding environment, as a platform for web app development. This could explain why Apple ported Safari to Windows, why Apple is pushing for faster Javascript performance in WebKit (the open-source browser engine behind Safari), and why Safari includes built-in database storage.

What this means for web apps is that programming web apps could, by and large, look exactly like programming for OS X. From my limited knowledge, programmers who code in Objective-C/Cocoa love it; I doubt the same is true for AIR, Silverlight (or .NET for that matter), or Java. Plus, the platform for distribution, according to Eran, would be completely open. This gets at one of the things I find so wrong about Flash: web development shouldn’t have to rely on proprietary app development tools. (My guess is Apple feels the same way, though surely their opinion involves more than my aesthetic dislike.)

But how does Apple benefit from an open web framework? A RoughlyDrafted reader offers some interesting, though of course highly speculative, thoughts: by creating an OS-neutral platform for not only their own apps (like the MobileMe apps), but for web apps at large — and one that web developers will actually flock to — the importance of the OS as a “platform” becomes meaningless, because the platform is the web. However, you still need an OS to get to the web, so the OS’s qualities as a program (security, performance, UI, etc.) become paramount. When the question of install-base and entrenchment no longer matter, the OS battle lines can be drawn up over the operating systems as apps themselves. OS X will, of course, win that battle.

(I think this is actually a large part of why Macs are already increasing in market share so dramatically: 95% of what people use their computers for is (web-based) email and browsing the web. You don’t need Windows for that.)