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JUNE 18, 2003
By Alex Salkever Apple's Real Worry Isn't the Loss of IE Who needs Internet Explorer, now that Jobs & Co. has its own browser? The much bigger threat is the growing chance that Microsoft will abandon Office for the Mac Who would have expected the strange six-year marriage between the stylish David of the PC universe and the lumbering, unstoppable Goliath to last so long? That relationship may yet endure, but it has recently become fairly frayed. On June 12, Microsoft's (MSFT ) Macintosh Business Unit announced that it would cease development of the Internet Explorer Web browser for the Apple (AAPL ) platform. That seemed to have caught many Mac watchers by surprise. It has even led some pundits to scream that the sky is falling, with the claim that Apple users won't be able to surf the Web with the same unthinking abandon that Windows users do. So is this the end? No way, Chicken Littles. At least, not yet. Here's the real skinny -- and why the true problem isn't the browser issue at all. SURFIN' WITH SAFARI. As an Apple user myself, I pretty much abandoned IE for Apple's own Safari browser almost as soon as it came out in January, 2003. I don't miss IE much. And I don't think many other Mac users do, either. Apple's latest figures on Safari downloads puts the number at 2 million. That's about 10% of Apple's total installed user base worldwide. Sure, some Web pages may not be optimized for Safari or the less popular Apple versions of the Mozilla browsers. But those pages are infrequent and relatively inconsequential. So much so that I can't recall any offending sites right now. More important, Apple's homegrown Safari browser actually outperforms IE in loading the vast majority of Web sites. It's fast, and it's getting new features with each release. Also, I seriously doubt that Web developers will pay any less attention to Apple now. Or, more accurately, I doubt that they'll build sites that work exclusively for Windows machines running IE. For that, Steve Jobs can thank Linux. Long maligned as a desktop nonstarter, Linux should pass Apple in market share for desktop operating systems on computers sold in the coming year. That means from 7% to 10% of all PCs shipped won't bear the Windows icon. BRIDGING TWO WORLDS. One out of 10 is enough to force Web developers to build sites that are friendly to multiple browsers. Linux and Apple share between them more than a half-dozen viable browsers. Those include Konqueror, Mozilla, Camino (a Mozilla-based browser), and Opera, among others. Should Linux' desktop growth continue, more and more developers will feel compelled to make their Web pages friendly to a wider variety of browsers. Still, a much bigger problem looms ahead for Apple. That Redmond pulled the plug on IE for Apple was hardly a surprise. After all, Jobs & Co. must have expected some reaction when it released Safari. But far more daunting is the prospect of Microsoft abandoning the Mac version of its popular Office software. That's because Apple hasn't yet shown it can replace Office for most of its users. And without Office, Apple's whole "switchers" program to convert Windows users will probably run aground. Microsoft Word, Entourage, Excel, and PowerPoint are key bridges between the two worlds. Remove them, and buying a Mac suddenly looks a lot scarier. Microsoft swears six ways to Sunday that it's going full-speed ahead in developing the next version of Office for Mac. And the Redmond team says it'll ship software this summer that will allow Apples running Microsoft's Entourage e-mail client to hook into the dominant corporate e-mail and scheduling program, Microsoft Exchange. "The relationship is as strong as ever," says Jessica Sommer, product manager at Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU).
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