Hasta La Gadget!

Steve, Steve, Steve. You really stirred up the pot this time, didn’t you? You couldn’t just leave well enough alone? Peter Oppenheimer and Tim Cook were doing perfectly well, running down Apple’s triumphant numbers during the earnings call early this week, but you had to jump on the line and poke fun at the competition.

Google’s Andy Rubin was the first to respond to Jobs’s comments that the whole Android openness thing is overrated. TweetDeck CEO Iain Dodsworth also came to Android’s defense, after his company ended up becoming fallout in Jobs’s assertions. Both men responded on Twitter, naturally.

We all knew it was just a matter of time before a Research in Motion executive hit back at Jobs over his comments. After all, the Apple chief kicked off his statement with a little friendly BlackBerry bashing,

[Apple’s sales figures] handily bea[t] RIM’s 12.1 million BlackBerrys sold, in their most recent quarter ending in August. We’ve now passed RIM. And I don’t see them catching up to us in the foreseeable future.

They must look 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.