Apple Sneaks Safari Onto Your Computer
Friday, April 18th, 2008If you run Windows and have quicktime installed, you may or may not have noticed, during your last automatic update, that there was an extra line in the Quicktime update queue this time around…it was Safari, Apple’s flagship web browser, formerly only found on the Mac.
Safari for Windows
Apple released Safari for Windows, beta, back on June 11, 2007, and has since brought it out of beta testing and decided, why not sneak it onto your computer? Hell, you don’t have a clue what goes on your own computer and most computer users won’t even notice, right? Well, that’s what Apple’s betting on whether they admit it or not.
To be honest, I’m sure it’s effective…the users who do notice won’t think a whole lot of it because it’s so normal these days (although less so than in the past) for software companies to sneak software onto your machine and it’s just another company pulling one over on computer users. The users who don’t notice, well, won’t notice; at least not until they happen to stumble upon the browser and think, “Hmm, what’s this?” Maybe they’ll even click to find out and Apple’s betting on them liking the slick interface (although as a web designer, can someone please tell me why Safari renders font bolder than any bold I’ve ever seen?).
What’s Interesting About This Form of Business Marketing?
The interesting thing about this is what I alluded to in the section above. The people who do notice this sneaky trick are so familiar with companies doing this it they won’t raise any fuss…hell, it’s nothing new, right? And the people who don’t notice surely won’t complain about something they don’t even know happened right under their noses. And who knows, maybe they’ll stumble upon Safari lying dormant on their cluttered desktop one day, click, and fall madly in love with it. The interesting thing about this type of marketing/promotion is that, under different circumstances it would be considered totally dishonest and sleezy, but Apple’s a big name company, and these kind of underhanded tactics are almost expected these days by computer users, so the trick quietly retreats without much more than a whisper raised in objection, and suddenly Apple snags so many million new Safari users, practically overnight…all the while nobody has any idea about the enormous leap forward in market share the company made.
It reminds me of Aaron Wall’s post yesterday over at SEOBook.com about Google’s dominance of everything they touch simply because they have access to all the statistics they need, and can shift things about to promote their own growth and prevent the growth of competitors. The whole time, the average Google user has no idea about the power Google holds at it’s fingertips…they just think Google’s finds what they’re looking for most of the time.
