NY Times Story on iPhone App Store

John Markoff and Laura M. Holson, on the debuting-in-a-few-hours App Store:

Twenty-five percent of the first 500 applications at the store will be free, Mr. Jobs said. Of the commercial applications, 90 percent will be sold for $9.99 or less, he said, adding that a third of the first wave of applications will be games.

The sidebar features a preview of all three apps from Tapulous — not a bad publicity coup at all for Mike Lee, I’d say.

Update: Gibberish alert:

Mr. Jobs failed to make his personal computers dominant, in part because software developers did not write as many programs for Mac-based machines as they did for Microsoft Windows PCs. He did not make the same mistake when he developed the iPod music players. Apple’s iTunes stores, with easy and inexpensive downloads of music, gave the device an insurmountable lead, to date, over other players.

So Markoff (and/or Holson) are arguing that the Mac failed to dominate because it had less software written for it, and Jobs “did not make the same mistake” with the iPod — a platform whose entire third-party software library consists of a handful of casual games — because it had a music store? Methinks Markoff is holding on too tightly to his own fallacious 20-year-old pet theory about why the Mac was overrun by DOS and Windows in the ’80s and ’90s.

★ Thursday, 10 July 2008