For the first time, Steve Jobs sat in on an earnings report and answered analyst questions. He said that in 102 days since July 11, the App Store has gone from zero to 200 million downloads. "We’ve never seen anything like this in our careers," Mr. Jobs said.

Mr, Jobs noted that there are now 5,500 apps available in 82 countries. He added that, "the rate of new applications being submitted is increasing every week. Competitors are scrambling to keep our App store, but it’s not as easy as it looks, and we are far along in creating ... a cycle of cool applications begetting more iPhone sales, thereby creating an even larger market, which will encourage each more iPhone software development."

In hushed tones, almost breathless, Mr. Jobs proudly punctuated the achievement: "All of this in only 102 days."

Later in the call, Mike Abramsky with RBC asked Mr. Jobs about how Apple only has one SKU with the iPhone and asked about the "opportunities" for a broader line. Mr. Jobs paused for a second and said, "Well ... I wasn’t alive then, but Babe Ruth only had one home run....he just kept hitting it over and over again.

"So I don’t think that -- I think the traditional -- the traditional game in the phone market has been to produce a voice phone in a hundred did 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 our -- in this phone business do not really have much experience in a software platform business. So we’re extremely comfortable with our strategy, our product strategy goes forward, and we [perceive] it as a software platform company which is pretty different than most of our competitors."

Of course, standardizing on the hardware doesn’t mean that Apple, at some point, couldn’t produce a similar product, with a different physical profile or target market, that looks exactly the same to developers.