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Serving at the Pleasure of the King

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Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King

#101

Post by vacri »

dsr_ wrote: post #2

Even ordinary users are beginning to understand this. My sister was upset at Amazon because the Kindle app on her iPod would not let her buy books directly. After she found out that Apple was demanding a 30% cut of those sales, she changed her mind. Now she's unhappy with Apple. I understand the impulse to look at however many millions of IOS devices and to immediately want to get into that market, but the long tail…

Why is she unhappy that a retailer gets their cut for supplying the MITM service?

I don't like Apple philosophy in the slightest and don't own any apple gear (old ipods excepted), so I'm not a fan of theirs in the slightest. But this 30% thing is just a non-issue. They're a retailer providing content. 30% is a boringly normal number for the retailers cut.

If amazon wanted to share their profits with the retailer (like book publishers have to with brick and mortar stores) then those books would be available. If Apple allowed those purchases for free, then they don't get any benefit for providing the service.

Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King

#102

Post by vacri »

ryanhuff wrote: post #47
adabsurdo wrote: post #31

I think the Apple app store policies is the bigger problem, because Apple is using it to control not just quality, but content, and forcing applications to use its payment gateway; which in itself, wouldn't much of a problem if they didn't take this gigantic 30% cut (10x more than other payment gateways), and prevented you from knowing your customer. This is truely unprecendented. Microsoft could screw you by cloning…

The AppStore isn't just a payment gateway. It's essentially a retail store. You would be hard pressed to get to keep 70% from many other retailers.

70% is about right, give or take. Depends on the industry. But retailers certainly don't ever take only 3% like payment gateways do.

This whole 30% thing comes from a new demographic that has never had any previous experience with business, who don't really understand the value of distribution channels and middlemen.

Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King

#103

Post by lukifer »

mcantelon wrote: post #67
nirvana wrote: post #64

It strikes me that this is exactly the position every web developer has with google. Google can arbitrarily and capriciously exclude them from their index. When google excludes you from the index, there is no appeal, there is no explanation, and, unlike Apple, google will not publish a set of (reliable) rules. (It gives a lot of advice but is inconsistent.) Also, like Apple, if you are not able to get in the big leag…

>Also, like Apple, if you are not able to get in the big leagues for distribution, you can distribute your product thru other, less popular channels that are more of a hassle. Are there any alternative channels that don't require jailbreaking?

There is openappmkt.com, but there are certain hardware features which are inaccessible to web apps, so it's a subpar solution.

Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King

#104

Post by mekoka »

nirvana wrote: post #64

It strikes me that this is exactly the position every web developer has with google. Google can arbitrarily and capriciously exclude them from their index. When google excludes you from the index, there is no appeal, there is no explanation, and, unlike Apple, google will not publish a set of (reliable) rules. (It gives a lot of advice but is inconsistent.) Also, like Apple, if you are not able to get in the big leag…

You don't need to pay google to be able to access websites that you created yourself, whether for personal, community or commercial use. You don't need to jailbreak your Internet to do it either.

When was the last time you hacked something together for yourself on an iOS device?

Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King

#105

Post by ugh »

So Apple can never ever implement bookmark sync in their browser? Because that’s what they did and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that. It’s a minor obvious feature, not some big complicated thing.

You know what I also don’t understand? What this has to do with the big open vs. closed debate. Apple implemented a new feature in their own browser. Google can just as well implement the exactly same feature in their browser. Open vs. closed doesn’t figure into this. At all.

That whole cleaning behavior of iOS debate is just stupid. Apple screwed up. So what.

Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King

#106

Post by ethank »

ugh wrote: post #105

So Apple can never ever implement bookmark sync in their browser? Because that’s what they did and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that. It’s a minor obvious feature, not some big complicated thing. You know what I also don’t understand? What this has to do with the big open vs. closed debate. Apple implemented a new feature in their own browser. Google can just as well implement the exactly same feature in th…

The telling thing is: it's existed for years with Mobile Me. Reading List isn't new.

Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King

#107

Post by hernan7 »

cstross wrote: post #30

If Microsoft added a feature to Windows that duplicated a popular application's functionality, developers would be screaming bloody murder and rioting in the, er, blogs and web forums Utter rot. This used to happen all the time in the 1980s and 1990s, before the DoJ anti trust lawsuit really got rolling. It was most obvious in office apps (ever wonder where the third-party spelling checkers and grammar checkers went?…

Back in the 90's they also included a TCP/IP stack into Win95, which used to be a (horrible) 3rd party app on Win3.1.

Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King

#108

Post by dsr_ »

vacri wrote: post #101
dsr_ wrote: post #2

Even ordinary users are beginning to understand this. My sister was upset at Amazon because the Kindle app on her iPod would not let her buy books directly. After she found out that Apple was demanding a 30% cut of those sales, she changed her mind. Now she's unhappy with Apple. I understand the impulse to look at however many millions of IOS devices and to immediately want to get into that market, but the long tail…

Why is she unhappy that a retailer gets their cut for supplying the MITM service? I don't like Apple philosophy in the slightest and don't own any apple gear (old ipods excepted), so I'm not a fan of theirs in the slightest. But this 30% thing is just a non-issue. They're a retailer providing content. 30% is a boringly normal number for the retailers cut. If amazon wanted to share their profits with the retailer (lik…

Why is she unhappy?

At a basic level, it's because her mental model of How Things Work broke. She thinks that it's reasonable that using the Amazon Kindle application on any platform she ought to be able to buy books from Amazon as part of that app. After all, she's signed in, Amazon knows who she is, at most they ought to ask for a password confirmation to let her spend her money.

And that doesn't work.

So she was unhappy with Amazon. Reasonable. She was so unhappy, she posted on Facebook about it, where a dozen of her friends pointed out that Apple wanted a 30% cut of content sold on their device.

Their device. Not her device. She paid for it, but now she sees that it isn't hers.

She thought that an iPod was like a computer: you use it, you select software to put on it, you use the software.

Her mental model breaks AGAIN, because she thought she owned the iPod. Now she finds out that it's actually an Apple-owned store that doesn't like competition.

Apple got their benefit when they sold her a device. They got more benefit when they sell her software to go on the device. Why should they get more benefit for interfering in a transaction between her and Amazon?

She knows what rent-seeking means, and she doesn't appreciate it.

Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King

#109

Post by abalashov »

hernan7 wrote: post #107
cstross wrote: post #30

If Microsoft added a feature to Windows that duplicated a popular application's functionality, developers would be screaming bloody murder and rioting in the, er, blogs and web forums Utter rot. This used to happen all the time in the 1980s and 1990s, before the DoJ anti trust lawsuit really got rolling. It was most obvious in office apps (ever wonder where the third-party spelling checkers and grammar checkers went?…

Back in the 90's they also included a TCP/IP stack into Win95, which used to be a (horrible) 3rd party app on Win3.1.

Ah, good old Trumpet Winsock. :)

Re: Serving at the Pleasure of the King

#110

Post by jodrellblank »

0x12 wrote: post #37
cstross wrote: post #30

If Microsoft added a feature to Windows that duplicated a popular application's functionality, developers would be screaming bloody murder and rioting in the, er, blogs and web forums Utter rot. This used to happen all the time in the 1980s and 1990s, before the DoJ anti trust lawsuit really got rolling. It was most obvious in office apps (ever wonder where the third-party spelling checkers and grammar checkers went?…

Back then every big company was doing this, or attempted to do this. The goal was to dominate the desktop and get as much grip on the end user as possible. Proprietary file formats for just about everything. Remember Desqview (by QuarterDeck)? DR DOS? GEM (also DR)? OS/2 (IBM)? NetWare (Novell)? All those companies did what Microsoft was doing with one small difference, they stopped at the OS or Desktop layer and nev…

But you did have conspiracy theories. Politics, idiocy, decisions from above, spec from contracts, engineering idealism, planning for things which didn't happen, technical limitations, stuck with previous design choices, inexperience...

Proprietary file formats - what happens when you don't set out to make a shared format, or an evil plot for lock-in and dominance? You decide.

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