Remember the Developer!

With the passing of Steve Jobs this week, and the introduction of 5 new Android phones at AT&T, I am reminded of a great Jobs quote from a 2008 Q3 earnings call where Mike Abramsky of RBC Capital was asking, basically, if Apple was going to make an iPhone Nano to sell more volume.  Steve Jobs' response was classic: "Well, I wasn’t alive then but from everything I heard, Babe Ruth had only one homerun, he just kept hitting it over and over again. So I think the traditional game in the phone market has been to produce a voice phone in a hundred different varieties. But as software starts to become the differentiating technology of this product category, I think that people are going to find that a hundred variations presented to a software developer is not very enticing and most of the competitors in this phone business do not really have much experience in a software platform business. So, we are extremely comfortable with our strategy, our product strategy going forward and we approach it as a software platform company, which is pretty different than most of our competitors."

So, when I see funky new designs from an Android phone manufacturer, with a square screens, I worry about fragmentation and if and how app designers would ever optimize solutions for this odd screen size and orientation.  Sometimes it does not pay to "think different", especially when you are thinking about platform compatibility.