Apple relies on apps way too much

There's a good read over on Gawker about the firing of a Wall St Journal employee who apparently pissed off Steve Jobs. An interesting point is brought up a couple of paragraphs in:

In a Q&A session with the assembled executives and managers, including Journal editors, Jobs railed against the apps newspapers like the Journal have created for his iPad. Their interfaces are terrible, he said, and their content is all too often limited . That the Journal's archrival the New York Times was among those singled out for criticism — Jobs hates the limited NYT Editors' Choice app — must have helped take the sting off. And Jobs did praise the WSJ's iPad app as very attractive. But the CEO also said the app was too slow, essentially calling it a clunky reading experience.

The choice part there is the comment about the NY Times app.



I've used the Editor's Choice app and will say this: it's limited, very limited in fact. It offers the top couple of stories from the Times and allows none of the depth of either the regular paper or the iPhone app (reading the NY Times via the iPhone app on the iPad is a no go; the app doesn't scale well). This makes perfect sense to the NY Times as they get to control what iPad users see and essentially draw them towards the website or physical paper.


The reason this matters boils down to this: the Times is unable to sell a news subscription on the iPad. Apple's terms are pretty onerous: a relatively poor profit split for the company and no access to the rich demographic user information that normally comes with subscriptions. Apple has essentially structured their terms in such a way as to make them toxic to periodical publications. The publications, in turn, have been creating sub-par applications in response; why spend the time and effort in making a top notch experience if the ROI is lower due to platform restrictions? It makes no sense.

And yet Jobs bitches about the lack of quality in the space. Just another example how Apple's rigidity and corporate culture, i.e. being assholes, hurts their partners and their customers.