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A long an interesting read from Betanews. Here’s an excerpt:

“Apple is David to Microsoft Goliath – and other ones, too. Goliath plays by one set of rules. David choses to change the rules, which favor his strengths rather than those of Goliath.

David Thinking is most provocative and surprising when Goliath acts like David. After all, David sometimes becomes Goliath; Apple is a giant in music with iPod and iTunes Music Store. But David turned Goliath also risks making mistakes that would allow another upstart advantage. Today, Apple is both David and Goliath, depending on market.”

So, turns out Apple has acquired Lala, the music streaming web service everyone’s talking about right now. Many people (here and here) are saying Apple has just did one of the best moves in years, purchasing a young and growing startup which could help Cupertino building a better iTunes, a better Genius, a better music discovery engine.

No doubt about it.

But I believe these people, Apple, Google and even Lala are forgetting about that small group of guys from Sweden who created one of the most successful music streaming services ever developed: Spotify. Sure, Spotify isn’t “officially” available in the US yet (but come one, everyone here knows how to use it anyway) but is going very well in Europe and the growth won’t stop in my opinion. I last played my local music 5 months ago, before installing Spotify. This service from Sweden is strong, reliable and offers a huge catalogue: every artist I searched for was in, with high-bitrate streaming, detailed bio, albums and singles. The recommendation system works fine too, it made me discover tons of bands I didn’t know before.

So, Spotify works and again - there’s no doubt about it. But here comes the cool thing: Spotify has an iPhone app which supports offline playlists and syncs with the desktop client.

Hmm. You may argue that the mobile application is exclusively meant for Premium users but seriously - would you prefer a per-album purchasing system or a huge music catalogue for $10 a month? You choose.

I once heard Shigeru Miyamoto used to scrap the entire development of a game if the project didn’t meet his standards. They called this scrapping “upending the tea table”. If the new iTunes won’t met your standards and your needs guys, go upend the tea table. There’s something better than Lala out there, and it’s called Spotify.

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“Now would be a really good time for Apple to rethink its video content strategy and make changes that will hold what I’m unaffectionately calling NBComcast at bay. It’s time for Apple to leverage its strengths by offering something like “Complete My Album” or “Upgrade to iTunes Plus” for movies, TV shows and music videos. Such iTunes features could change how people electronically rent or buy video content.”

I don’t think Apple will ever do the same things Youtube and Hulu already do. I mean, Cupertino never does the same things as others. They came out with a full featured online music store when online music stores didn’t exist.

They won’t just copy Hulu or offer the same stuff you can find (for free) on Youtube. If they have plans for something video related, it will sure be part of the Tablet project.

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“Steve Jobs has already gone on record to say he doesn’t believe that single-purpose dedicated devices will be a big market. “But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day. Because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device,” he told The New York Times.

So what is the iPod touch? Just an MP3 and video player? No way. It’s also a gaming unit that runs a full universe of apps, including email and Web browsing. One day it’ll eventually get a camera like its smaller iPod nano sibling. That’s right: general purpose. It’s safe to say that any new Apple device with a larger form factor than the iPod touch, regardless of its name, will be designed to play games, movies, television shows, surf the Web, run apps, and maybe even navigate the world.

An iTablet would be so much more than an e-reader.”

Finally, someone got the point. Stop talking about the iTablet as the Kindle killer, or whatever Apple needs to re-invent the press industry. It’s a tablet computer and you know, sometimes you just need a new hardware to create a new software. That’s what Apple is doing.

Is it that hard to understand?

“My question is: why won’t Apple allow me to try an app before I buy it? The availability countdown works great for content rented from the store like movies. I can play all I want for 24 hours, and then it’s deactivated. That would be ideal for apps too. I download it, see how it works, and after some time the app prompts me to purchase when launched. The prompt has a link to the app’s page in the store and I can make my decision. This is often how it’s done on the desktop. Why not the iPhone?”

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It’s not up to Apple to provide a demo version of each application. Every developer should release lite versions of their apps to let the users test them before purchasing the full version.

But with the recent in-app purchasing system, things could become a lot more interesting: what if every app is free for - say - 3 days then the user must buy it in order to continue using it? This method would have the huge pro of deleting all those Lite / Free apps that clutter the App Store and most important, would allow us to test and then decide to purchase. Much like David Klein writes in his post, a “limited-time demo”.

There an interesting debate which is going on since many years about how Mac apps should be distributed an installed. Back in September John Gruber wrote this interesting piece, outlining the pros and cons of three popular formats of delivering Mac apps: .zip, .dmg and installer. He was inspired by this post where Alexander Limi (founder of Plone, working at Mozilla now) discussed the problems of the installation process of Firefox on the Mac platform.

In this post I’ll discuss all the possible scenarios, referring to other articles found on the web to give you my idea of how Mac applications should be distributed.

Read more

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“We’ve built a store for the most part that people can trust,” he says. “You and your family and friends can download applications from the store, and for the most part they do what you’d expect, and they get onto your phone, and you get billed appropriately, and it all just works.”

Hey Phil, do you understand that the problem is in the backend, with the developers? I know that the apps I download do what I’d expect, but go tell this to those devs who had to wait 4 months for their app to be accepted.

You know, it’s the approval process that doesn’t work as I’d expect.

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“For example, the simple act of entering text via an on-screen keyboard. When holding the device in portrait orientation then the on-screen keyboard could be essentially the same as the iPhone’s in concept, but what about when you’re holding the tablet horizontally with two hands? How does the keyboard work in that scenario? If you stretch the keyboard across the device’s screen when in landscape orientation then your thumbs won’t be able to hit the middle keys without stretching and reaching. This orientation works on the iPhone because the screen is only 480 pixels wide but what happens when the horizontal dimension of the screen is 800px or 1200px? This same layout just doesn’t work.”

Great read. Though I believe the OS will be something entirely different, both from iPhone OS and Mac OS. Apple doesn’t like to mix stuff, usually.