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Mozilla Exec Claims Apple is Hunting OSS Browsers
Rob writes with a link to a Computer Business Review article on the negative impact Mozilla COO John Lilly sees Apple is having on Open Source. Lilly claims that Jobs' recent discussion of Safari on Windows is an attempt to create a duopoly of browsers (IE and Safari), with Firefox and the rest on the outside looking in. "The graph 'betrays the way that Apple, so often looks at the world,' Lilly said. 'But make no mistake: this wasn't a careless presentation, or an accidental omission of all the other browsers out there, or even a crummy marketing trick,' he said. 'Lots of words describe Steve and his Stevenotes, but 'careless' and 'accidental' do not. This is, essentially, the way they're thinking about the problem, and shows the users they want to pick up.'" We discussed an analyst's opinion on this subject this past Friday.
Instead, this is Apple trying to create the illusion that it really is the big dangerous new browser on the block, and create the perception of market dominance and leadership. I don't think it will work, and this is likely to make Apple look foolish in the eyes of the non-default to IE market, but that's what Apple is trying to do with these silly charts and pronouncements.
Apple's marketing was always extreme, and that is their style for as long as Jobs is on top.
This achieves few things:
- The core of Mac users become even more devoted to the Apple brand (it's sort of like a cult, it doesn't matter sometimes Jobs says ridiculous things).
- The rest of the world sees Apple as arrogant, sometimes foolish, but always and always interesting nonetheless.
- Which on the other hand makes Apple a great news material, and gains it a huge media coverage.
So the bottomline: they're doing what they have to, to survive. The "reality distortion field" of Jobs isn't a myth - it's very real, and the guy's doing it to get the exact effects he gets.
Apple always tries to create its own bubble where it competes with mythical collective enemies such as "The PC", "Microsoft", "The rest of the Phones", "The rest of the browsers". To support this bubble, you need the extreme kind of marketing Jobs does, otherwise it falls a apart and Apple will have to compete in the real market like any other company.
Jobs uses bubbles in his own company as well. Many people know that he would separate his employees in "buubles" and let them "fight" each other (in their work) to full exhaustion (such was the case with Apple II and Lisa teams). The other team is the enemy, and you gotta do everything humanly possible to support your own bubble.