Steve Jobs discusses App Store with Wall Street Journal

This morning's Wall Street Journal has a really interesting article (use Google News to view the complete text) about the App Store, complete with quotes from Steve Jobs himself! While the full article is definitely worth a read, here are some of the highlights:

• After the first month, App Store sales are about $30 million US, meaning at least $360 million in revenue for Apple if sales continue at that pace (we discussed the success of the App Store on a micro-level, here)

• Steve on the App Store: "I've never seen anything like this in my career for software."

• Steve on the future of mobile technology: "Phone differentiation used to be about radios and antennas and things like that. We think, going forward, the phone of the future will be differentiated by software."

• Steve on the ability to disable a program remotely: "Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull."

As Steve Sande pointed out in last night's Talkcast, amid all the criticism aimed at the App Store, we often forget that the store is only one month old. That isn't to say that those criticisms are invalid or unnecessary, it just brings some perspective to the "bigger picture," if you will. Now that we are a month in, it is clear that the store, the distribution format, and the platform are real game changers for the mobile industry and for Apple itself.

Thanks John!