Apple chief executive Steve Jobs announced on Monday that the company has made available a test version of its Safari Web browser for Windows-based PCs.

Apple said Monday that it would make its Safari Web browser available for Windows-based PCs, opening a new front in its rivalry with Microsoft. The announcement came at the end of a presentation made by Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and chief executive, at the company’s annual World Wide Developers Conference. It indicates that Apple is increasingly confident in its ability to compete against Microsoft’s desktop computing monopoly.

Shares of Apple dropped sharply after the announcement, falling $4.30, to $120.19. Several Wall Street analysts said the decline proved that Mr. Jobs was, after all, mortal. In recent years, Apple’s chief executive has refined product announcements into an art form that leaves his audience cheering and then rushing to a store. Wall Street has come to hope that each new event will create a new iPod-style billion-dollar market.

"This was pretty underwhelming," said Gene Munster, a financial analyst at Piper Jaffray. "He hit a double instead of a homer." With his usual showmanship, Mr. Jobs said that Safari would have twice the performance capability of Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer. He also expressed confidence that Apple would be able to increase its market share against the dominant software company, pointing to half a billion downloads of Apple’s iTunes software, most of them by Windows users.

A test version of the program was available Monday for downloading from Apple's Web site. In an interview after his presentation, Mr. Jobs said he had no concerns that the new competition might anger Microsoft or lead to retaliation, such as slowing the development of the version of Office for the Macintosh. "After all, we are developing for Windows," he said.

Like many of Apple’s strategic moves, the implication of an Apple browser for Windows was not immediately clear. It is likely that Mr. Jobs is now plotting a broader business strategy that will allow Apple to grow beyond its niche position in the computer market of about a 5 percent share.

"Who knows? Maybe we can grow our Safari share in the future,” Mr. Jobs said. “We’re going to try."

Apple’s move is significant, industry executives said, because it indicates that despite the end of the browser wars of the late 1990s, Microsoft’s continued ability to retain more than 80 percent market share is a continuing threat to its competitors. Mr. Jobs said that Safari’s market share was currently about 5 percent and the share of Firefox, the open source browser, was about 15 percent. There has been a persistent fear that Microsoft would be able to create new standards that would force computer users to adopt its software to reach certain Web sites and Internet services.

The broader appeal of the browser might have implications for Apple’s iPhone. In his presentation, Mr. Jobs said that the company was encouraging Apple software developers to use modern Internet software standards to make applications compatible with Apple’s iPhone, which will go on sale June 29. The announcement is likely to touch off a frenzy of activity because Mr. Jobs said that applications that are written to Internet standards like AJAX and designed to work with Web browsers would work from the first day the iPhone is available.

“It will create a much more significant consumer platform for the iPhone,” said Mike McGuire, a research analyst at Gartner, an industry research firm in San Jose, Calif.

By moving software development away from personal computers and cellular phones and toward the Internet, Apple is attempting to persuade its developers that they can achieve new economies of scale while permitting the computer and consumer electronics firm to build more secure devices and computers.

“There is something very clever going on here with Apple releasing Safari for Windows,” said Scott Love, president of Aquaminds Software, a Macintosh developer based in Palo Alto, Calif. “Don’t ever underestimate S. J.’s motives.” Some developers said they were disappointed that Apple would continue to restrict software development for the iPhone. However, a number of them said that they were intrigued by the company’s new Windows-oriented Web browser strategy.

Much of the rest of the presentation focused on showing 10 new features of the company’s Leopard version of the OS X operating system. Mr. Jobs had shown many of the features, such as a new backup system called Time Machine and a new more powerful version of the Apple instant messaging system called iChat. On Monday, Mr. Jobs showed several refinements to the company’s operating system appearance and graphical user interface.

At previous events announcing the Leopard version of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system, Mr. Jobs has hinted at important new features. However, Monday’s event indicated that Leopard, which was originally supposed to be commercially available by now and then was delayed until October when the company shifted resources toward its iPhone, had no major surprises.

Mr. Jobs teased the audience of about 5,000 software developers, saying the company would have multiple versions of Leopard, all priced at $129. "I’m sure most of you will want the Ultimate version," he said. The reference was a not-so-subtle jab at Microsoft, which offers Windows Vista at a variety of price points with different features. Apple, of course, will sell just one version.

Electronic Arts and Id announced that they would begin releasing popular games for the Macintosh simultaneously with Windows versions.

Source: NYTimes.com

Sergery Brin (Co-founder, Google)

Succeed With Simplicity

Simplicity is an important trend we are focused on. Technology has this way of becoming overly complex, but simplicity was one of the reasons that people gravitated to Google initially. This complexity is an issue that has to be solved for online technologies, for devices, for computers, and it's very difficult. Success will come from simplicity. Look at Apple, the success they have had, and what they are doing.

We are focused on features, not products. We eliminated future products that would have made the complexity problem worse. We don't want to have 20 different products that work in 20 different ways. I was getting lost at our site keeping track of everything. I would rather have a smaller set of products that have a shared set of features.

Chris DeWolfe (Co-founder, Myspace)

Keep Social Networks Social

The key is to be true to your community's norms and values. You can't just force yourself on people and try to sell them something they don't want - that's good advice for marketers generally, but particularly on community-driven sites like MySpace. You have to find ways to add value to your members' lives while being consistent with your brand's identity.

Chad Hurley (Co-founder, YouTube)

Give Your Startup a Fighting Chance

1. Test first:- Launch your product or service before you have funding. See how people respond to it before you have a PowerPoint and business plan - have something people can use, and go from there.

2. Seek outside feedback:- As you start building the product, don't assume that you know all the answers. Listen to the community and adapt. We had a lot of our own ideas about how the service would evolve. Coming from PayPal and eBay, we saw YouTube as a powerful way to add video to auctions, but we didn't see anyone using our product that way, so we didn't add features to support it.

3. Give partners what they want:- Approach your business partners with concepts that they can get their heads around, and try to respond to their needs. An interesting example is what we've done with the music labels. With Warner and others, we saw an opportunity to protect the labels' rights and create a new market. Now we can do things like add music to people's travel videos. It allows users the freedom to create and to do it legally.

Kevin Rose (Founder, Digg)

Let the Users Run the Show

Letting users control your site can be terrifying at first. From day one we were asking ourselves, "What is going to be on the front page today?" You have no idea what the system will produce. But stepping back and giving consumers control is what brought more and more people to the site. They have a sense of ownership and discovery at the same time. If you give users the tools to spread and share their interests with others, they will use them to promote what is important to them.

We have 17 employees, and we have 4,500 submitted stories a day. We could hire more staff, but that's not what the site is about. It's about allowing users to define the site and police the site themselves.

Stewart Butterfield (Co-founder, Flickr)

It Has to Be About More Than Just Money

One of the biggest lessons I've learned is that there has got to be a reason for what you're doing. You actually have to care about what you're doing. The business has to be about something. Whatever the point of it is does not have to be inconsistent with making money, but usually if that's the sole reason, it is not very successful. Because you have to have confident employees, happy customers, and reliable suppliers to run a company as much as profits. I am still here to win. All the people on the Flickr team are committed to what we're doing, which is to be the eyes of the world. Otherwise, I would say fuck it, go back to the beach, and get in shape.

Source: CNN.com

Sina Corp, one of China's top Internet portals, and Google Inc said on Monday they would cooperate on news, advertising and search services in China, the world's second-largest online community.

The partnership would initially allow Google users easier access to Sina's news content, the two companies said. They did not reveal any financial details of the agreement.

"In the future, we can explore cooperation in advertising and search, and other areas," Lee Kai-Fu, the president of Google in Greater China, told reporters. The two said details about how the cooperation would proceed were still being worked out.

Although Google and Yahoo have been making inroads into China, analysts have said that domestic operators such as Sohu.com, Baidu and Alibaba held an obvious cultural and first-mover edge.

Source: ExpressIndia.com