Changin' times at Tapulous

 All change at Tapulous – the company is shedding key members of the original development team as company leader CEO Bart Decrem is implementing a major strategic change.

With all the good news and positive buzz surrounding the music and gaming iPhone application, it should all be a happy merry gravy train at the company. After all, Tapulous stays forever in the top 50 apps, has the music industry preparing to release tracks through the service – from out here, it looks like a gravy train that’s only just left the station – good news.

Bad news: the roll-call of quit or quitting staff includes: Sean Heber, the company’s first employee, Tristan O’Tierney, a senior iPhone engineer, and Louie Mantia, a designer, TechCrunch reports. And a month ago, co-founder and chief architect Mike Lee was forced out of the company.

Seems Decrem has changed the company focus from being a dev house for polished and useful applications into the development of simple, easy to produced solutions (think Facebook apps for iPhone…).

“Decrem says that Tapulous’s original engineering team (nearly all of whom have left at this point) thought that the company would be a place for the “independent developer spirit.” But in his mind this isn’t the way to build a successful business,” TechCrunch explains.

The story is available in full right here.