Jobs Rants At Q4 Earnings Results

Steve Jobs rarely appears at Apple’s financial conferences, but when he does, oh boy, lookout.

Steve Jobs isn’t shy by any means, but he’s definitely not a loudmouth, so his confidence at yesterdays earnings announcement is either his pride getting the better of him, or he wants to make sure we’re all watching while his company makes the future.

Jobs stopped just short of cattiness while describing RIM and Google’s position in the mobile market.

On RIM, Jobs noted that they have reached the end of their competitive advantage, and are faced with the difficulty of adapting to a new model.

“We’ve now passed RIM. And I don’t see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future. They must move beyond their area of strength and comfort, into the unfamiliar territory of trying to become a software platform company. I think 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 300,000 apps on Apple’s App Store, RIM has a high mountain ahead of them to climb.”

On Google, Jobs mocked the idea that Google is open, and drew attention to TweetDeck for Android, who said they had to support more than 100 different versions of Android on 244 different handsets.

“Google loves to characterize Android as “open,” and iOS and iPhone as “closed”. We find this a bit disingenuous, and clouding the real difference between our two approaches.”

He also noted that there will soon be four different app stores on the Android platform, which will be a mess for developers and users.

Jobs spoke out on a number of other topics, including the tablet market. He shrugged off the notion of a 7″ tablet, stating that they weren’t looking for a lower price point.