A nice piece from MacRumors, which digs up a 1985 interview with Steve Jobs, including this gem of a quote:

My philosophy is that everything starts with a great product. So, you know, I obviously believed in listening to customers, but customers can’t tell you about the next breakthrough that’s going to happen next year that’s going to change the whole industry. So you have to listen very carefully. But then you have to go and sort of stow away—you have to go hide away with people that really understand the technology, but also really care about the customers, and dream up this next breakthrough.

This is a problem with many industries, not least the majority of the tech world. Most companies provide customers with what they say they want; good companies provided customers with what they actually need, even when they didn’t realise they needed it.

Paul Thurrott:

There are some parallels to draw between […] Cook’s taking over day-to-day operations at Apple […] and Steve Ballmer’s ascension at Microsoft. And not to ruin the surprise, but this may be bad news for Apple. The simplest way to explain this is to simply provide the closing quote in the [NY Times] article: “He will not be the visionary, but that’s O.K. because there are other talented people around him.” Sure. That’s what they said about Ballmer too. Just a thought.

John Gruber:

There are some parallels: an operations executive succeeding a visionary product-oriented founder. But, I’d say Cook-as-Ballmer is pretty much the worst case scenario for Apple.

The warnings signs with Ballmer have been there for years. He’s been out of touch for a long time. Remember when he laughed at the iPhone? Said it had “no chance”? Let’s not worry about Tim Cook until he starts saying dumb things.

In addition to that, I’m pretty sure Tim Cook’s never leapt about the stage like a mental person. He also led Apple through the previous period where Jobs was away from the action, and hasn’t put a foot wrong when he’s been under the spotlight at Apple events or on earnings calls.

Even in the most recent earnings call, Cook differentiated himself from Ballmer in dismissing the opposition. Ballmer got caught by claiming Apple’s product had no chance, yet it went on to be a massive success. Cook’s dismissal of Android tablets is based on facts rather than guesswork. On Honeycomb tablets (i.e. the first Android tablets with an OS actually designed for tablets rather than smartphones), he states:

There’s nothing shipping yet, so I don’t know. They lack performance specs, they lack prices, they lack timing. Today, they’re vapour. We’ll assess them as they come out. However, we’re not sitting still…

There’s a big difference there from “no chance”.

DOS emulator iDOS arrived on the App Store last year and was swiftly removed once it became clear the author had ill-advisedly bundled commercial games with it that he didn’t have the rights to. Apple was also apparently pissed that iTunes file sharing enabled you to upload your own games to the app. This, apparently, is bad and totally different from, say:

• File-sharing books to iBooks, GoodReader, Stanza and the like;
• File-sharing comics to Comic Zeal;
• File-sharing documents you’ve written to Pages;
• File-sharing practically anything to Air Sharing.

So in iDOS 2, the author removed file-sharing, resubmitted and the app found its way back to the store. The author reports it’s been pulled again, “because the ability to run custom executable is violating the appstore [sic] policy”.

These ‘custom executables’ (i.e. third-party games) can only be installed by using a third-party utility to access app bundles. Applications like iPhone Explorer and PhoneView enable users of non-jailbroken devices to mount an application bundle and access its /Documents and /Library folders. In iDOS, you could shove old DOS games in there, then fire up the command line on the app itself and load the games. Apple considers this evil, even if you, say, own the rights to the games, or they are freeware and you therefore legally have the right to run them.

My worry is that Apple will now close the backdoor to app bundles, somehow blocking access to the aforementioned folders. Few people know they exist and that you can access them, but they are massively handy, because backing up these folders is the ONLY way you can back-up content from apps and games before deleting them, and the ONLY way you can reinstate your data after a reinstall. I’ve done this myself many dozens of times—it’s the only way I can have a usable device but also not ‘lose’ the many hours I put into the likes of GTA.

Apple clearly doesn’t care about this. When you wipe an app, the data’s gone for good. This is absurdly stupid, putting iOS games on a par with cheap, nasty DS carts that don’t have battery back-ups. If Apple automatically backed up game and app states to iTunes and provided the option for reinstating this data on a reinstall, blocking backdoors would be fine, but it doesn’t. Here’s hoping I’m wrong, but knowing Apple, it favours locking down wherever possible, even if there’s really little or no reason to.

In January, I remarked on IceFish’s amazing line of side-scrolling Metal Slug rip-offs, which weren’t at all basically the same game trying to spam the App Store.

There was Commando:

And the amazing, innovative Commando Soldier:

And then the truly ground-breaking Action Commando:

But it appears I wasn’t thorough enough in my exploration of the App Store, because I missed iCmdo, for which I can only apologise. That creative and novel game looks like this:

But what if, even after iCmdo, you’ve not had your fill of exciting, unique, cutting-edge iOS games? Why, you’re in luck, because IceFish has created two more pioneering titles that are unlike anything you’ve ever seen on the App Store before.

First up, there’s the distinctive CommandoCityRescue:

But Craig, I hear you say, I don’t like games with ‘City’ in the title, so what can I do? WHAT IS THERE FOR ME HERE? Don’t be disheartened, because IceFish has created a game just for you, and it’s called CommandoRescue:

I’m sure you’ll join me in congratulating IceFish for creating what must be the most diverse and imaginative selection of games on the App Store. EA, your time is done—there’s a new champ in town!

Phil Libin’s guest post on TechCrunch is an eye-opener. The day the Mac App Store launched, the Mac leapt from bringing in about three per cent of new Evernote users to 52 per cent, and although this figure slid over the following days, it’s still high.

Libin thinks this proves desktop software remains viable, but that user experience is key, as is discoverability. One thing Apple got very right with iOS was in placing the App Store front and centre and encouraging users to buy software. The same’s now true on the Mac. One can only hope someone at Microsoft is paying attention, because a Windows equivalent would be fantastic (and potentially cut down on malware/virus issues if the store was properly curated).

Libin also reckons the experience has cemented his thoughts regarding users gravitating towards the best user experiences, justifying the company’s native-apps approach:

If Evernote’s desktop clients were written in Adobe AIR, I’d be worried right now. The immediate popularity of the Mac App Store, and the iPhone App Store before it, reinforces my belief that in a world of infinite software choice, people gravitate towards the products with the best overall user experience. It’s very hard for something developed in a cross-platform, lowest-common-denominator technology to provide as nice an experience as a similar native app.

As the CEO of a software company, I wish this weren’t true. I’d love to build one version of our App that could work everywhere. Instead, we develop separate native versions for Windows, Mac, Desktop Web, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, HP WebOS and (coming soon) Windows Phone 7. We do it because the results are better and, frankly, that’s all-important. We could probably save 70% of our development budget by switching to a single, cross-platform client, but we would probably lose 80% of our users. And we’d be shut out of most app stores and go back to worrying about distribution.