Step 1. Put the screws on a handful of smaller suppliers
Step 2. When no-one says anything, apply the same screws to some larger suppliers
It will be interesting to see how Amazon responds to Step 3.
Browsing Posts tagged Apple
I didn’t blog about it at the time but last week Apple announced that it was going to sting a bunch of European publishers for a cut of their profits. In short, Apple is demanding that if these publishers want to continue publishing into iPad apps, the subscriptions have to go through iTunes so that Apple can cream their traditional 30% off the top.
Not surprisingly, the publishers are none too happy about this. Neither, it turns out, are the Belgian authorities and competition minister Vincent van Quickborne has launched a “rapid” competition investigation into the issue.
In the article linked to, above, Andrew Orlowski makes a very valid point:
But the publishers have only themselves to blame – by failing to develop a common industry “news stand” payment platform. This would have made paying for stuff much easier, and lowered transaction costs for all concerned.
And this is exactly why News Corp’s Project Alesia was created – with the intention of licensing it to all comers on equitable terms. But the print industry didn’t have the brains to join in. The 100-man project was dismantled last autumn.
As a result publishers now have a choice of getting reamed by Apple, reamed by Amazon or (perhaps) getting reamed by Google.
As long as people rely on proprietary standards they will continue to be at the the mercy of whoever owns those standards. And if a proprietary standard becomes dominant, the temptation will always exist for the owner of that standard to engage in monopolistic practices.
Open standards – that is, standards that are publicly available and free (gratis) to use – avoid this. Open standards can be used and implemented by anyone and, because of this, they ensure that you are not vulnerable to the price gouging activity of a single company.
Writing in Scientific American recently, Tim Berners-Lee highlighted the threat that various walled gardens pose to the Web. He mentioned social networks walling off information posted by their users as well as Apple’s preference for proprietary protocols and the emergence of smartphone apps.
Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium. It brings principles established in the U.S. Constitution, the British Magna Carta and other important documents into the network age: freedom from being snooped on, filtered, censored and disconnected.
Today, Apple decided to give us all a quick taste of where walled gardens can lead:
Apple has apparently banned an iPad-based magazine from its online store – because the titled focuses on Google’s Android platform.
Walled gardens are shady things indeed.
The Register has a long and well-researched article on the implications of Apple’s soon-to-arrive Mac App Store and what it means for the Mac ecosystem.
Up until the day the Mac App Store opens, Mac apps will be able to jostle for advantage on a level playing field where developers wrestle to out-innovate one another, and where — more importantly — the arbiters of success are folks who buy Mac software, and not folks who are employed as Apple’s App Store police.
That’s called the free market, and it has been a cauldron of innovation since Adam Smith stirred the pot with his timeless invisible hand.
The day that the Mac App Store opens for business, however, buyers of Mac software might feel as if they’re free to choose which apps to install on their iMacs and MacBooks, but in reality their choices will be “curated,” to use Jobs’ deceptively kindhearted term.
As has been true with the iPhone/Pod/Pad App Store since its inception, Apple will decide the universe of apps from which consumer-level Mac users will be allowed to choose.
We’ll quickly admit that Jobs, when introducing the Mac App Store, noted that “It won’t be the only place [to buy Mac apps], but we think it’ll be the best place.” Unlike iPhone/Pod/Pad users locked into the current iOS App Store, Mac users will still be able to load non–App Store apps onto their Cupertinian desktops and notebooks.
But let’s be realistic: most won’t.
The article goes in to some detail about several of the restrictions imposed by the Mac App Store and the implications of their enforcement. The full article is well worth a read but the shorter version is this: The Mac is fast becoming a rather expensive toy and one that any serious users will soon find themselves having to abandon.
But for some reason, he didn’t think twice about upgrading his second-generation iPhone to the latest operating system release, OS 4. Big mistake. Although his phone is technically functional after the upgrade, it offers the performance of a brick. He’s so very, very disappointed—mostly with himself. On the other hand, that didn’t stop him from ordering a new iPhone 4 to address the situation!
Yesterday’s Dilbert cartoon made me think of St. Steve of Jobs.
Updated, because the Thursday strip is good as well.
[T]he killer application for a mobile phone remains the ability to make phone calls, and it seems possible that in all the excitement Apple has forgotten that.
- El Reg on the problems with Apple’s recently released iPhone 4.
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