Congratulation Apple and Steve Jobs (man behind Apple) for their first ever US$20 billion quarter. As usual Steve Jobs makes this as a good opportunity to put down its competitors (Google and RIM) and we can see some replies from RIM Co-CEO (Jim Balsillie) and Google Android Chief (Andy Rubin). Lets see how big kids argue on "who has the best toy?"
Steve Jobs
Google loves to characterize Android as open, and iOS and iPhone as closed,
We find this a bit disingenuous and clouding the real difference between our two approaches.
Andy Rubin
the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make"
Steve Jobs
We think the open versus closed argument is just a smokescreen to try and hide the real issue, which is, what's best for the customer, fragmented versus integrated?
Andy Rubin
Some of the press has called it fragmentation, but that's probably the wrong word for it
the better word for it is 'legacy.' With these phones and devices, the iteration cycle is incredibly fast. It used to be that every 18 months, a new device would reach the market. But we're seeing it happen every three or four months. The software obviously has to keep up and I don't think anyone is harmed by it.
Steve Jobs
We think Android is very, very fragmented and becoming more fragmented by the day
Andy Rubin
I think everybody wants this rapid iteration.
Steve Jobs
I don’t see them (RIM and Android) catching up with us in the foreseeable future,
making the best product at aggressive prices
Jim Balsillie
Many customers are getting tired of being told what to think by Apple,
or those of us who live outside Apple’s distortion field, we know that 7-inch tablets will actually be a big portion of the market.
Steve Jobs
Twitter client TwitterDeck recently launched their app for Android. They reported that they had to contend with more than a hundred different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets. The multiple hardware and software iterations present developers with a daunting challenge.
Andy Rubin
"The marketplace — the store by which applications are distributed — does a really good job of pairing up the device capabilities that the user has with what's available for the device, so it's not like they'll see multiple versions of an application for the device." But this doesn't really address the potential problems facing developers.
Are you an Apple fan, Android fan or a Blackberry fan? I did not hear anything from Windows Mobile 7 ?
