Were you excited or puzzled by the announcement of Safari for Windows in yesterday’s WWDC keynote? If you were like me, you questioned what the business reason for it was. Besides the sheer wish to completely dominate marketshare (Apple has a long way to go in the browser category) what could possibly cause such a decision to be made. After all, Apple doesn’t make any money off of Safari.

Well, with the announcement of third-party apps on the iPhone using Web 2.0 and AJAX via the Safari engine, it now makes sense. There’s a good post over at The Apple Press that says it best:

Instead of full blown, stand-alone applications, the iPhone applications will be powered by Web 2.0 and Ajax technology, which will then run on Safari’s web engine. So, simply stated: 3rd party iPhone applications will run within Safari. Now, in order for developers to write and test “applications” for the iPhone, they must have access Safari. As of yesterday, that would limit iPhone developers to Mac developers only, since Safari did not exist on Windows.

The post later explains that based on the Windows-user domination in the iPod purchaser group, it is safe to assume the iphone would command a similar breakdown.

But is that a good thing or a bad thing? If Apple is convinced droves of PC users will flock to the iPhone why not force developers to get Macs to develop third-party apps on it. What do you think? Is this a good or bad decision for Apple?

[Via The Apple Press]