My EMBA Journey

Apple Safari for Windows


Microsoft IE MarketShare
In the late 90's Microsoft killed Netscape by its shear power of Marketing, Strategic product positioning and in a way poor counter efforts from Netscape themselves. Microsoft amazed everyone by capturing 95% of marketshare by 2003. Then in 2004 came Mozilla Firefox which surprised everyone by taking a sizable marketshare away from Microsoft within 2 years. Now there is even bigger threat coming for Microsoft, and that is Safari for Windows. It was announced by Steve Jobs that Apple Safari browser would be available for Windows and currently it is available for beta.

Impact of Apple Safari over Microsoft IE
Currently Apple Safari has a marketshare of 3.5% in the Internet browser market. I personally think this number is going to rise in next 5 years. My estimate is at the least 10 - 15%. This would cause grave impact to the position of Microsoft Internet Explorer. If we combine the marketing power of iPod/iTunes and the new iPhone along with AppleTV, Apple Mac and may be one day a Apple Leopard OS for Intel. I don't see a reason why the marketshare numbers wouldn't go even further higher.

Where is Apple leading us all
Apple is taking baby steps to recapture its lost glory days of 80's. I think they are probably positioning themselves to increase their market-share in the high profit equipments such as Wireless, Digital Entertainment, and Second PC Market.
I think Apple's strategic partnership with Google may take them towards their goals.


Some interesting facts on Internet Browser Trends .....

Internet Browser Trends
In 1997 Netscape had a marketshare of 81% and they went down to 10% in 2001. During the same period Microsoft's marketshare went up to 89%. In 2004 Microsoft had a market share of 95.48% as per WebSideStory(Wiki Reference). This is an era when Microsoft got very complacent and didn't care releasing any new upgrades to IE 6.0, it turned out to be a disaster for Microsoft as open source developers took it upon themselves to create a rival Internet browser with new features. Competitors started introducing features such as Tabbed window, pop-up blocks. Microsoft was forced to follow innovate or mimic strategy. Within 2 years of Mozilla FireFox existence they captured an amazing 9.95% of marketshare.

Latest Trends