I’m seeing a lot of comments about Apple’s decision to silently install Safari on Windows as an update to iTunes. The move has been declared as almost malware-like, considering the practice. And this hurts Apple more than they realise.

I have a lot of friends that switched completely to Mac. And often enough they ask me if I know about a program similar to Winamp that they can use on the Mac. I’m generally surprised, considering that I find iTunes to be quite an effective application for managing your music library. As a side-note, I’ve never really liked Winamp all too much, feature-wise especially, but that doesn’t matter.

Why do people have a gag reflex when it comes to iTunes? Because on Windows, Apple decides to install QuickTime if you want iTunes¹; they install Bonjour with iTunes². People don’t like that – I know I definitely don’t.

Sure, my friends may not be a representative sample. This is what I see, though. When even after switching, they have second thoughts about iTunes, because of Apple’s strategy on Windows. Certainly, I can understand Apple wants to expose customers to Safari, but if they don’t know about it, it doesn’t help too much. And when they do find out, they get mad. And hate Apple because of it.

1. This is to be able to play videos, but a lot of people don’t think of iTunes beyond as more than a music application rather than a media application [↩]
2. Though Adobe installs Bonjour as well with CS3, and maybe there are other applications as well that do it [↩]