There are some legendary stories about what happens when Apple enters your market. I think Marco's right that he's pretty safe on the Instapaper front (for the reasons he says). That said, here's another tale of Apple entering a market, written by Cabel Sasser at Panic about Audion:<p><a href="http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/" rel="nofollow">http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/</a>
Re: the Starbucks effect, I'm not sure I agree. I think the difference between Starbucks moving in next door and Apple implementing a feature like Reading List is that in the case of Starbucks moving in next door, their marketing drives foot traffic to the vicinity of your location--which you can then take advantage of. I.e., people walking by see your signage and therefore you can capture sales. It is the creation of demand, but it's the creation of demand that your own (much less resourced marketing) can then take advantage of.<p>In the Reading List case, there's no guarantee that customers that "get educated" about the product will necessarily ever find out about yours. It's still up to you to be in the same "location" as the competitor's product in order to benefit from their marketing.<p>This <i>may</i> be the case for very well-known products that are always going to be discussed in concert with a feature launched by an Apple in the media, product reviews, etc. But it's certainly not categorically the case.
The track record for Apple turning third party apps into features (as opposed to their own apps ala iTunes), has been pretty pathetic: usually what happens is that its so poorly done by Apple that the feature just stops being used and the functionality just flat out dies. Examples:<p>1. Quicksilver <-> Spotlight. Spotlight is terrible. Everyone I know who used quicksilver just uses nothing now. They certainly haven't "switched" to Spotlight because spotlight doesn't do anything half as well as quicksilver did, not even launching apps for god's sake.<p>2. Kaleidoscope <-> Dashboard. Another disaster. Dashboard seems to exist solely to be accidentally opened, or I guess for some people it serves as their dedicated weather "space". Apple does not hype up widgets at all anymore.<p>3. Safari RSS. Does anyone actually use this? Or how about Mail.app RSS? At least here the third party RSS apps didn't die (although I see less people using RSS than ever, but I don't attribute this to OS RSS integration).
I agree with everything, except his last point:<p>"And if they build a large enough feature-set and backing service to make it a true competitor, they’re likely to create a lot of potential Instapaper demand."<p>Isn't that a little backwards? If Apple builds a true competitor, then it's going to create a lot less potential Instapaper demand. See Watson and Kaleidoscope for reasons why.
Not much unless OSX achieves higher market share than its competition or people on other platforms start to use Safari instead of their preferred browsers. That won't happen anytime soon.<p>I'd be more worried about a feature like this coming to Mobile Safari.
I'd rather have a "Video Viewing List" that gets video watching out of the browser. Apple is one of the few participants in the ecosystem that might have enough "market power" to do that at this late date.