On Feb 17, 2011, at 1:24 PM, Benjamin Krueger wrote: > Chew on this ladies and gentlemen. The real problem isn't that Apple is going > to eat 30% of sales on their own platform. The real problem is that Apple's > contract forbids you from charging *less* for the same product anywhere else, > and forces you to offer content for sale on their platform if it is for sale > anywhere else.
That's only for subscriptions. That means that if a newspaper or magazine provider wants to provide subscriptions on the iOS products, they can't lock users into their own proprietary subscription handling system. Those users who want to buy those subscriptions must be allowed to use Apple's platform as an alternative if that's what they want, and those providers have to give it to the customers at the same price. That's actually a huge win for subscribers, because that means you can manage all of your subscriptions in a single place. And you don't have to pay a premium to Apple in order to get that capability. The subscription providers almost certainly wouldn't be giving a lower price anywhere else anyway, because these sorts of systems cost money to set up and run, and Apple has the advantage of being able to do so with economies of scale that none of the subscription providers could dream of. Think about online banking and the e-billing solutions. Do you want an e-billing solution that is unique for each and every company you have to deal with, or do you want a single e-billing solution that is provided by your bank, and all the providers have to use that e-billing solution if they want to send you e-bills? Yes, forcing providers to use the e-billing solutions for a wide variety of banks is a problem they have to face, but they'd have to face that regardless unless they don't want to do e-billing at all. For the consumers, one-stop-shopping of this sort is a huge, huge win. > For most app developers who use multiple platforms (that would be just about > all of them) this means you either instantly lose 30% (and probably your > profit margin) on sales in the iOS family, or you pass that 30% tax on to > your customers everywhere. If you want a subscription system, you'd be paying the price to maintain that subscription system regardless. So the overhead would be there whether it was being paid to Apple or someone else. Since Apple can do that job more efficiently than most anyone else on the planet, that means that they can charge relatively lower overhead than anyone else, and both the subscription provider and Apple can have a higher overall profit margin while still charging lower prices to the end consumer. > Apple's position is untenable; they've reached well beyond manipulating their > own little ecosystem and are now manipulating entire markets with the threat > of being locked out from iOS. This is clearly anti-competitive behavior; > Apple's own content services such as iBooks and iTunes will not be subject to > this tax, while content services like Kindle, Nook, Pandora, Rhapsody, and > dozens of others will be. Apple is leveraging their control of the > distribution channel to give themselves an unfair competitive advantage. Apple doesn't generate most of the content for iBooks or iTunes. They are simply a distribution channel for almost all the content on those services (Apple does print a few books and create a little bit of other content that is sold through these channels, but the amount of Apple-generated content is actually miniscule compared to the rest of the stuff from other publishers for which they are the distribution channel). The subscriptions will be managed through iTunes, and iBooks is handled through the iTunes system as well. Apple isn't prohibiting any other content distribution channel on iOS, they're simply saying that they have to be allowed to provide the same content at the same price as any other content distribution channel, and that users have to be allowed to choose whatever content distribution channel they want. So, Apple is protecting their users from being locked into any other content distribution channel. That's not anti-competitive, regardless of how much the other industry giants might scream and wail and gnash their teeth. It's actually the other providers that are being forced to open up, and then only if they want to make that distribution channel available on iOS. Of course, if those industry giants really want to completely go around Apple, they can always make the content available via an HTML5 page on the web, or make it free and ad-supported. -- Brad Knowles <[email protected]> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
