Hey Steve: Pride Comes Before the Fall

So Apple’s doing pretty well, raking in $20b in their fourth fiscal quarter revenue, $4b after tax income. A little 5% slip in gross margin but who’s counting — gotta spend money to make money. Steve Jobs typically keeps quiet during earnings calls but he couldn’t resist this time and talked some trash, almost all of which was aimed at Google, a jab at RIM and anyone trying to get into the tablet game. I’m not sure why he does this, but don’t care that much because this quarterly notwithstanding I am more uplifted, net, by Google news than Apple news, both of which I keep an eye on. Root for both, I own a bit of both. Actually I enjoy it, it’s amusing; I admire his style and his success as here, for example, it compounds the stage to snuff out Microsoft’s Windows Phone before it manages to say hello to the pie charts. In that I would take pleasure and fifty bucks from fellow writer and bad gambler David K.

Jobs makes some good points, I’ll give him that (along with a funny Flash joke), but it’s worth noting that with most of Google’s successfully launched products and services, things tend to get better and better than they already are, and quite noticeably and steadily. The only surprise you’d get from Google is a lengthy lack of pleasant, routine surprises. They launch and unveil headturners left and right and up and down so fast that it’s hard for the public to remember scandals like Street Viewgate. This is certainly true with Android fragmentation and its quickly becoming a non-issue. But hey, I’ll let the man speak to you in case you missed it and let Android itself, and not Schmidt, do its own talking (and I understand it will have some big bullet points to deliver imminently).

On with the assault, quotes parsed; feel free to return fire in the comments (or fan the flames):

In reality, we think the open versus closed argument is just a smokescreen to hide the real issue, which is what’s best for the customer: Fragmented versus integrated. We think Android is very, very fragmented and getting more fragmented by the day. We think this is a huge strength of our approach compared to Google’s. When selling to users who want their devices just to work, we believe integrated will trump fragmented every time. We are confident that it will triumph over Google’s fragmented approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as open. We are very committed to the integrated approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as closed.

The 7-inch tablets are tweeners, too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with an iPad. The current crop of 7-inch tablets will be DOA, dead on arrival. Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small.

We now passed RIM and I don’t see them catching us in the forseeable future. RIM has a high mountain ahead of them to climb. They must move beyond their area of strength and comfort into the unfamiliar territory of trying to become a software platform company. I think it’s going to be a challenge for them to create a competitive platform and to convince developers to create apps for yet a third software platform, after iOS and Android. With 300k apps on Apple’s app store, RIM has a high mountain ahead of them to climb. I think it’s going to be a challenge for them to create a competitive platform and to convince developers to create apps for yet a third software platform, after iOS and Android. With 300k apps on Apple’s app store, RIM has a high mountain ahead of them to climb.

Q: Any thoughts on Flash?

Flash memory? We love flash memory!

Flash hasn’t affected us at all; most of the video on the internet is HTML5. We have a very good product here that’s tough to match… we priced iPad pretty aggressively. We’re out to win this one. I think right now it’s a battle for mindshare of developers, and a battle for the mindshare of customers. Right now iPhone and Android are winning that battle.

Now flame it up folks as I need material for my next article defending Android (yeah, another one of those).

Doug Simmons