In his Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address today, Steve Jobs announced the public beta of Safari 3 for Windows. This left some people at work scratching their heads and focusing on two questions: 1) Does Jobs think he’ll bite off a meaningful chunk of Windows browser market share with this move? 2) Does he think people having a good time with Safari and iTunes on Windows will be more likely to switch to Mac?

I suspect not, on both counts. If anything, releasing Safari on Windows will make it that much easier for PC-using (or even PC-centric) developers to begin to support Safari on OS X. (Ironically, these developers will no longer have to buy Macs to do so.) In addition, he mentioned that to make an app for the iPhone, you make an app for Safari. Since there will be no SDK released for the iPhone, at least in the near future, the way to develop for the iPhone will be to leverage the Safari framework in the iPhone by making an AJAXy Web2.0 insert-buzzword-here Safari-compatible app that works on the phone’s small screen. Releasing Safari on Windows accomplishes the aim of making iPhone development available to PC-using developers, a much larger set of developers overall than the Mac crowd.