On one hand I suppose nobody should get a free ride. Apple put a lot of hard work into building such cohesive and user-friendly ecosystem. If they have their own bookstore they're trying to run why should they enable a competitor's in their own home? On the other hand this stinks for consumers. Slightly. They can still go to the website on their own but Apple made it a bit more inconvenient. If you're already a Kindl…
| If they have their own bookstore they're trying to run why should they enable a competitor's in their own home? If Microsoft spent so much on R&D for Windows 95 and IE, why shouldn't they build it into the OS? Why shouldn't they lock down their APIs to make it difficult to make competing products inside their OS? Really?
Microsoft didn't prevent any browsers from being installed on Windows, they didn't require any special processes or try to prevent any competitors from offering competitive or superior services. Microsoft just figured if the baked in stuff was good enough, most people wouldn't bother to change, and they were right.
I could would agree with Apple taking a cut of in-app purchases where billing is completed through Apple's infrastructure, but forcing application builders (your community builders) to hamstring their products or pay you a cut is anti-competitive in a sense that I think is worse than anything Microsoft has done.
Microsoft helped foster innovation, and then stole it and made it difficult to compete, but you could compete. Apple is just hamstringing the competition so that they can't compete.