Long NYT Story on the App Store

3,000-word feature by Jenna Wortham on the iPhone App Store and the mobile software competitive landscape, including interviews with Phil Schiller and Eddy Cue from Apple.

“Our goal is very simple: We want to have the best platform for applications that there has ever been on any product,” notes Mr. Schiller, the marketing executive. “We know we’re not perfect, but we know we’re better than anything else that has been and we want to keep improving it.”

Update:

Remarks in the article from Katy Huberty, an analyst at Morgan Stanley:

Ms. Huberty likens the advent of the App Store and the iPhone to AOL’s pioneering role in driving broad-based consumer adoption of the Internet in the 1990s. She also draws comparisons to ways in which laptops have upended industry assumptions about consumer preferences and desktop computing. But, she notes, something even more profound may now be afoot.

“The iPhone is something different. It’s changing our behavior,” she says. “The game that Apple is playing is to become the Microsoft of the smartphone market.”

There’s a big difference between being the next AOL and being the next Windows.

★ Saturday, 5 December 2009