Shit My Jobs Says: Earnings Call Edition [Video]

The last time Steve Jobs got on an earnings call, it was to reassure investors that he was in good health . So what made him spend an hour taking questions today? Here’s what Jobs said, and what it means.

Steve On RIM (But Really WP7)

We’ve now passed RIM and I don’t see them catching up with us inside the foreseeable future. They need to move beyond their area of strength and comfort into the unfamiliar territory of looking to become a software platform company. I believe 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 prior to them to climb.

It’s easy enough to select on BlackBerry, but that’s not the best company Jobs is talking about here. Not likely. Replace ” RIM” with ” Microsoft,” and you get a horny good idea of the way Apple sees-or wants developers to work out-Windows Phone 7. But let’s not forget that if there’s some thing Microsoft knows, it’s software. That makes them a really credible threat.

Steve On Open (Android) and Closed (iOS) Systems

Jobs is excited to head phone for phone against RIM, but compared to Android he’s very happy to trot out the iOS statistics. Get rid of last quarter’s 4.1 million iPads and 250,000 Apple TVs and Apple doesn’t stack up quite so favorably. As for open versus closed, Jobs actually has an excellent point here-regardless/due to how open it’s, Android’s got no bigger problem than fragmentation, and its openness ends up in generally horrible OEM skins that cripple their devices.

I think in any case now it’s a battle for developers, and a battle for the mindshare of developers, and a battle for the mindshare of consumers, and I feel without delay iPhone and Android are winning that battle.

Framing the smartphone battle with regards to courting developers does two things for Jobs: one, courts developers. Two, defines success by a metric-quantity and quality of apps-that iOS has a seemingly insurmountable lead in.

Steve On Why the iPad Is Unbeatable

The more time that passes, the more I am convinced that we’ve got a tiger by the tail here. And it is a new model of computing, which you know, we already have hundreds of thousands of folks trained on with the iPhone, and that lends itself to plenty of alternative aspects of life, both personal, educational, and business. So I see it as very general purpose, and I see it as really big. And the timing, one can argue concerning the timing endlessly, but I don’t think you’ll be able to argue that it’s gonna happen anymore.

The more Jobs talks concerning the iPad, the more apparent that he sees it as his true legacy. And as laptops continue to provide option to tablets, he’ll be the fellow who first gave them to us.

I think component to [our iPad pricing advantage] is because we engineer so much of it ourselves. The A4 chip inside it really is an Apple creation. Everything I mentioned from the battery chemistry to the enclosures, and we’ve learned a whole lot, from the miniaturization we’ve done on iPods and iPhones and we’re a truly high volume consumer electronics manufacturer, so I believe we’ve learned a whole lot, developed a whole lot of our own components where others ought to buy them available to buy, with middlemen getting their cut of things, and I feel we’re systems architects and understand how to build systems in an awfully efficient way. So I believe this can be a product we’ve been training for for the last decade.

Vertical integration: do it right, and you’ve got a locked in ecosystem that’s almost impossible to conquer. Do it wrong, and you’re Sony. To date Apple’s done it right.

Steve On Flash

Q: Any thoughts on Flash?

SJ: Flash memory? We adore flash memory.

Jokes! But seriously, Steve Jobs hates Flash .

Flash hasn’t presented any problem at all, as you know lots of the video on the internet is out there on HTML5, and you know, having the iTunes media store and over 35,000 apps on the iPad dwarfs the rest, and we predict that we have got a great product here that’s going to be hard to check, and we’re not done.

This almost counts as modesty; it’s true that much of the video on the internet is offered on HTML5, but in addition true that it may possibly not had been-not less than not yet-were there not a pressing need for Hulu and its ilk to get content on the iPad asap.

Steve On Apple TV

I can report that in precisely an exceptionally short amount of time we’ve already sold a quarter million of them. Over 250,000. And we’re thrilled with that. I feel that it’s a superb product, and its $99 price point is highly enticing, and I feel that after we get the AirPlay stuff in place before the tip of this year, it’s gonna give another big reason behind people to buy it.

250,000 devices aside, what’s interesting to note is that Joel was right : it’s AirPlay you should be looking for. That’s where Apple makes its move in your lounge.

Steve On 7-Inch Tablets

We think the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA-Dead on Arrival. Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small, and increase the dimensions next year, thereby abandoning both customers and developers who jumped on the 7in bandwagon with an orphan product. Feels like a lot of fun ahead.

The reasons Jobs gave for the death of the 7-inch tablet were manifold, but they all boil right down to size. Too small for comfort, too big for Froyo. For Jobs, 10 inches is the tablet sweet spot, end of story. For consumers? They’ll have their chance to come to a decision soon enough.

The reason we wouldn’t make a 7-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t are looking to hit a cost point, it’s because we don’t think you can also make an amazing tablet with a 7-inch. We predict it’s too small to specific the software that folk wish to put on this stuff. And we predict as a software driven company, we predict concerning the software strategies first-and we know that software developers aren’t gonna deal real well with a lot of these different sized products, after they need to redo their software whenever the screen size changes, and they aren’t going to deal well with products once they can’t put enough elements on the screen to build the type of apps they wish to build. So, once we make decisions on 7 in tablets it’s not about cost it’s concerning the value in product after you consider the software

So much for those 7-inch iPad rumors . But more importantly, so much for Apple’s 7-inch tablet competitors from Samsung and Dell . Until we get some decent hands-on time, though, it’s hard to tell whether here’s true-or that Jobs just hopes it’s.

You’re staring at it wrong, you’re watching it as a hardware person in a fragmented world. You’re watching it as a hardware manufacturer that doesn’t really know much about software, that doesn’t really consider an integrated product who assumes that the software will somehow safeguard itself. And you’re sitting around saying, ” Well, how do we make this cheaper? Well we will be able to put a smaller screen on it, and a slower processor, less memory.” And you assume that the software will somehow just come alive on this product that you simply’re dreaming up, however won’t. Because these app developers have taken good thing about the product that came before, with faster processors, with larger screens, with more capabilities that they are able to profit from to make better apps for purchasers… Most [developers] should not follow you, most of them will say, ” I’m sorry but, I’m not gonna go back and write a watered down version of my app just because you’ve got this phone so that you can sell for $50 less, and you’re begging me to put in writing software for it.”

Hello, Galaxy Tab! Hello, Dell Streak! But hold on-this isn’t just frivolous trash talk. Hardware fragmentation, and specifically the introduction of hardware that caused a terrible software experience, is loads of what killed Windows Mobile, that’s why Windows Phone 7 manufacturers need to adhere to strict device guidelines.

Steve On What To Do With All That Money

We strongly believe that one or more very strategic opportunities may come along… we’re in a distinct position to milk [them] due to our strong cash position… We’d wish to continue to keep our powder dry because we do feel that there are one or more strategic opportunities one day.

Apple’s doesn’t buy up companies as frequently as Google or Microsoft, but after they do it’s clear what they’re after: Liquid Metal patents for sturdier devices. Lala to someday put iTunes inside the cloud. PA Semi to make their own mobile processors. So whatever Apple’s saving money for now, know that it’s going to be big.
[Video credit: SAI ]

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This post is tagged: credible threat, excellent point, foreseeable future, software platform, unfamiliar territory