Under the guise of “dropping by for [Apple’s] first US$20 billion quarter,” Steve Jobs used the Apple earnings call to rant about the company’s competition (Google, Research in Motion, tablet developers) and—strangely enough—stakeholders (customers and developers). But mostly Google’s Android operating system for mobile devices.
Jobs did address the open v. closed business models head-on—if seemingly scripted—citing Microsoft’s abandoned PlaysForSure digital rights management (DRM): “Even if Google were right and the issue is ‘closed’ versus ‘open,’ open doesn’t always win. We think the ‘open’ versus ‘closed’ argument is a smokescreen for what’s really best for the customers. We think Android is very, very fragmented and becomes more so every day. We think this is a huge strength of our approach when compared to Google’s. We think integrated will trump fragmented every time.”
He also addressed human factors issues related to tablet computers with less than 10 inches of screen real estate, saying, “One naturally thinks that a seven-inch screen would offer 70 percent of the benefits of a 10-inch screen. This is far from the truth: Seven-inch screens are 45 percent as large as an iPad…. Apple has done extensive user testing and we really understand this stuff: There are clear limits on how close you can place things on a touch screen, which is why we think 10 inches is the minimum screen size to create great tablet apps.”
Google’s Andy Rubin responded to Jobs’s rant with a tweet making it clear that Google needs to hire a few lot more user experience professionals: “the definition of open: ‘mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make’” For the uninitiated, that’s a command-line sequence to make a directory, download Android source code, and build the operating system. What’s missing—from a developer’s perspective—is the fact that only major releases of the Android source are available and only those inside Google can add to the code base. What’s missing—from a user’s perspective—is that the vast majority’s eyes glaze over when they see this; they don’t want to deal with all that crap on a mobile device.
TweetDeck chief executive Iain Dodsworth responded to Jobs with a bit more finesse, again with a tweet: “Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errr nope, no we didn’t. It wasn’t.” TweetDeck also released a chart visualizing the Android ecosystem. TweetDeck has two developers working on the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) platform, which is basically Flash with support for HTML, Ajax, and JavaScript.
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