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Antitrust inquiry into Apple over Section 3.3.1

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Re: Antitrust inquiry into Apple over Section 3.3.1

#71
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How are the restrictions placed by Apple on what's allowed in the App Store any different then the restrictions placed by console owners on what's published for the XBox or PS3? >For example, the XBox XNA community games system requires people to use .Net - there's no technical reason for this (the XBox is clearly capable of running native code) XNA requires you to target the .NET runtime. It does not dictate what t…

The specifics are different, no doubt - but the ethos is the same. Microsoft force you to use .Net (of some form) and their APIs because that fits their business model (i.e. ties you to the XBox). They're restricting me from using my platform portable pure C code, which is their choice. I obviously don't know, but suspect if large amounts of code started targeting XNA in a cross platform way, they'd come down on that…

>They're restricting me from using my platform portable pure C code, which is their choice.

Couldn't you just use managed C++?

Re: Antitrust inquiry into Apple over Section 3.3.1

#72
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the antitrust lawsuits against printer manufacturers for ink refills. You don't have to have a monopoly in a sector (printers) to be subject to anti-trust laws, having a monopoly on consumables designed to work with your product can be sufficient.

Seems to me like the harmful to consumers aspect of the antitrust case will be the hard part to prove here. It seems like people are in near-universal agreement that printer companies were/are price-gouging on their inks in a way that is exclusively harmful to consumers. However, Apple's whole narrative on this TOS section is that doing otherwise would in the long run harm consumers by slowing down the evolution of t…

[deleted]

Re: Antitrust inquiry into Apple over Section 3.3.1

#73
post #56
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They're making choices based on what they think is best for their platform, and letting the market chose." The former is absolutely true. The latter is absolutely not. Hence why the government is looking into it. Apple's actions are completely inexcusable and borderline illegal. It is only by incredible bravado and arrogance that they could have ever thought that 3.3.1 would be acceptable. They could have accomplish…

You're missing the bit where Apple isn't by any means the only phone manufacturer around.

And you're missing the part where they're a $250 billion dollar company.

This has nothing to do with being a monopoly. When big companies do shitty things to undermine normal competitive forces they get scrutiny.

Re: Antitrust inquiry into Apple over Section 3.3.1

#74
post #69
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This justification is one of the most astonishingly vapid ones around. I'm not quite sure how it keeps getting repeated as if it has credence, when technically it has no legs to stand on. The distinction Apple is making is that they have a temporary mindspace monopoly of the smartphone markets and they want to cement it in by forcing developers to help the Apple cause.

All the technical justification you need can be had from Adobe's other half, which only 3 days ago shipped their first Photoshop for Mac which doesn't use Mac OS Classic GUI APIs. Adobe's delay in switching to the more modern APIs is the reason why they couldn't ship a 64-bit Photoshop for Mac until now. As Jobs has explained, they've been burned before.

>All the technical justification you need can be had from Adobe's other half, which only 3 days ago shipped their first Photoshop for Mac which doesn't use Mac OS Classic GUI APIs.

Humorous given that Apple has several very prominent apps (iTunes, Final Cut Pro) that still have made the migration. And they control both sides!

However that is irrelevant. Tell me again how, if Apple revises the API, that suddenly every app available will instantly morph to accommodate it? Of course that is completely and utterly asinine. It's a ridiculous argument that I can't believe knowledgeable people have, desperately trying to reach some sort of rationalization of Apple's actions.

Re: Antitrust inquiry into Apple over Section 3.3.1

#75
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the antitrust lawsuits against printer manufacturers for ink refills. You don't have to have a monopoly in a sector (printers) to be subject to anti-trust laws, having a monopoly on consumables designed to work with your product can be sufficient.

Seems to me like the harmful to consumers aspect of the antitrust case will be the hard part to prove here. It seems like people are in near-universal agreement that printer companies were/are price-gouging on their inks in a way that is exclusively harmful to consumers. However, Apple's whole narrative on this TOS section is that doing otherwise would in the long run harm consumers by slowing down the evolution of t…

Great, great point. The impact on the consumer is the bottom line for these laws. It's not the level of competition, how free the market should be, or how easy things are for developers.

Re: Antitrust inquiry into Apple over Section 3.3.1

#76
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Prior to the iPhone, there was virtually no real development allowed on phones that achieved any levels of success (carriers had the platform locked down hard). cough The development for mobile phones partially sucked (and still does, partially; it's in the nature of the beast I suppose, for now) before the iPhone, but I don't know about it being not allowed. You have to draw a distinction between so called featur…

Your entire response seems to have missed my "allowed on phones that achieved any levels of success" qualifier. Name me any pre-iPhone development platform allowing development that had ever created a truly viable marketplace. There were a few faltering attempts with Windows Mobile and Symbian, but frankly, they were terrible. And yes, I am conflating development and the distribution channel, but this seems fine to m…

"There were a few faltering attempts with Windows Mobile and Symbian, but frankly, they were terrible."

Technology marches forward. My N1 has more power than my desktop did just a few short years ago.

Prior initiatives died primarily because of technology limits that made the real usability of apps incredibly limited.

Re: Antitrust inquiry into Apple over Section 3.3.1

#77
post #7
post #2

Since Apple doesn't have anything resembling a monopoly in any market it operates in, and since all DoJ can do is file a suit that is predicated on them having one, this is unlikely to go anywhere.

Look at the antitrust lawsuits against printer manufacturers for ink refills. You don't have to have a monopoly in a sector (printers) to be subject to anti-trust laws, having a monopoly on consumables designed to work with your product can be sufficient.

The legal action that I'm aware of about printer ink alleges that HP colluded with Staples, paying them a huge amount of money, to prevent them from carrying a competing product.

But, as a counterexample, I'm not aware of a successful suit that challenged HP's use of printer cartridge rights management technology.

Re: Antitrust inquiry into Apple over Section 3.3.1

#78
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How are the restrictions placed by Apple on what's allowed in the App Store any different then the restrictions placed by console owners on what's published for the XBox or PS3? >For example, the XBox XNA community games system requires people to use .Net - there's no technical reason for this (the XBox is clearly capable of running native code) XNA requires you to target the .NET runtime. It does not dictate what t…

The specifics are different, no doubt - but the ethos is the same. Microsoft force you to use .Net (of some form) and their APIs because that fits their business model (i.e. ties you to the XBox). They're restricting me from using my platform portable pure C code, which is their choice. I obviously don't know, but suspect if large amounts of code started targeting XNA in a cross platform way, they'd come down on that…

Microsoft force you to use .Net (of some form) and their APIs because that fits their business model (i.e. ties you to the XBox). They're restricting me from using my platform portable pure C code, which is their choice.

You're missing the point. Microsoft makes it technically difficult to write a game in a non-.net language, but (at least as far as anyone knows) it's not disallowed in their developer agreement. If you can get LLVM to spit out .net bytecode that works, then good on you, there's nothing keeping you from using it. There's no clause that prevents you from writing a Lisp interpreter in your game, nothing to keep you from auto-generating C# from template files, etc. The only reason people don't do these things is that they're a pain in the ass, not that they would be in violation of the developer's agreements that they signed.

Certainly attempting to achieve developer lock-in is part of good business, especially in the world of game development. But make no mistake, Apple is in uncharted territory here: rather than trying to get people locked-in by providing a smoother workflow with their toolset than they'd find elsewhere (which is what Microsoft does with .NET), they're declaring that all other tools, better or worse, are strictly prohibited.

They're making choices based on what they think is best for their platform, and letting the market chose. This is how the free market is supposed to work.

Bundling IE with Windows without any option to replace the browser is what would be best for the Windows platform. A "plato o plomo" acquisition/sued-to-death strategy employed by would-be-monopolists to kill off competition before it's big enough to compete is best for the business. Gauging prices in a market where a near monopoly exists is "best for the platform."

What you're really hinting at is a discomfort with the entire idea of anti-trust legislation, another discussion altogether. Suffice it to say that "let the market decide" would, if taken as mantra, excuse every sort of monopolistic or anti-competitive abuse that we've ever seen, which indicates to me that it's not a remotely valid argument.

In this case, Apple has, with a stroke of the pen, killed off several toolsets that compete with the one that they're trying to promote. It reads like a textbook example of tying, using control over a mobile phone application marketplace to kill off competition in the developer tools market, and it's almost entirely targeted at a single competitor (though there's plenty of collateral damage, as well, Unity et al).

I think Apple may have something to worry about here.

Re: Antitrust inquiry into Apple over Section 3.3.1

#79
post #74
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the technical justification you need can be had from Adobe's other half, which only 3 days ago shipped their first Photoshop for Mac which doesn't use Mac OS Classic GUI APIs. Adobe's delay in switching to the more modern APIs is the reason why they couldn't ship a 64-bit Photoshop for Mac until now. As Jobs has explained, they've been burned before.

>All the technical justification you need can be had from Adobe's other half, which only 3 days ago shipped their first Photoshop for Mac which doesn't use Mac OS Classic GUI APIs. Humorous given that Apple has several very prominent apps (iTunes, Final Cut Pro) that still have made the migration. And they control both sides! However that is irrelevant. Tell me again how, if Apple revises the API, that suddenly every…

To put it even more starkly, if Apple were to revise the API, then the middleware pushes an update, and all those hundreds or thousand of app developers simply recompile with the new OS target. All of their apps are now feature-compatible with Shiny New Feature X, rather than those hundreds or thousands of developers all having to replicate the same work. This is Frameworks 101.

The entire point of an abstraction layer is to isolate a developer away from the underlying systems, to let him write more business logic and less systems support code. All modern software development is built on the concept of frameworks, layers of abstraction, and the like. Even Objective C itself is an abstraction away from the ARM11 instruction set on the iPhone's CPU. Do developers writing Objective C produce inherently inferior apps to those writing ARM11 assembly?

Frameworks reduce the total number of man-hours required to produce and maintain software. I will argue that a good framework produces more high quality software than a bunch of developers all rolling apps on the metal, which then have a longer lifetime, due to the fact that fewer developer hours are required per app to maintain it moving forward. (Please note that I am not making any kind of judgment here about whether or not CS5 constitutes a "good framework".)

It takes some pretty serious denial to see Jobs' case against middleware, cross-compilers, and abstraction layers as anything but an attempt to lock developers solely into the Apple ecosystem. Frameworks reduce developer hours in more than one way - they reduce the number of hours required to put your app on multiple platforms. (To put it another way, this is why we have 3D engines like Unreal and Crytek; it's why we have 3D API layers like OpenGL and DirectX. You can write a game without them, but you'll spend thousands of hours solving problems that have already been solved for no appreciable benefit.) It's abundantly clear that there is no real technical justification for the clause; Apple is attempting to increase the amount of work that developers have to do to target multiple platforms, so that they'll simply give up and pick one: Apple's.

Re: Antitrust inquiry into Apple over Section 3.3.1

#80
I think an intervention would be a disaster.

If Steve Jobs is right, and the progress of the platform is really slowed by cross platform toolkits, then intervention would literally slow down the progress of computing, and possibly set a precedent that slows progress indefinitely. If by being right, Apple ends up in a more dominant position, that won't prevent Google and Microsoft from altering their own strategies to compete. Both of them still have massive market power they can leverage.

If he's wrong, then surely he's handing a serious competitive advantage to Google, Microsoft, RIM, Nokia etc, and as all the cool apps start to appear on all of these platforms along with a plethora of interesting and cool devices, Apple will shrink back to a minority player differentiated only by style.

I think it would be a terrible for both sides of this debate if the outcome is determined by judges and Apple is not allowed to take this risk.

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