<story><title>A Rare Disagreement</title><url>http://www.marco.org/3627726252</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>raganwald</author><text>I&apos;ve already commented on this subject:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://raganwald.posterous.com/the-freedom-to-eat-pizza&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://raganwald.posterous.com/the-freedom-to-eat-pizza&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The tl;dr is where I say &quot;Cry me a fucking river.&quot; When will people learn? A closed, proprietary system is a closed, proprietary system.&lt;p&gt;Marco is arguing that the Massah is being too rough on the sharecroppers, he&apos;s beating them inconsistently and in ways they couldn&apos;t reasonably predict. Let me see if I understand: These poor indentured servants built a business around what they perceived as a loophole in Apple&apos;s iOS terms. Their plan was to make millions of dollars off their &quot;free&quot; iOS apps while Apple got nothing. Then Apple shook them down for 30%.&lt;p&gt;Well I couldn&apos;t have predicted exactly &lt;i&gt;how&lt;/i&gt; Apple would react, but I don&apos;t imagine anyone ought to be surprised that they did &lt;i&gt;something&lt;/i&gt;. They&apos;re the landlord. That&apos;s what landlords do: They extract rents from the sharecroppers, and if rents aren&apos;t enough they kick the sharecroppers out and take over the land for themselves.&lt;p&gt;You can bitch and whine, you can figure out how to make money while Apple tolerates your presence, or you can stop building on proprietary platforms. Arguing that Apple is illogical or ought to be smarter or is shooting itself in the foot... A waste of electrons. Does Apple look like the kind of company that takes our advice on how to run a business? If it listened to people like us, it would be selling Windows PCs right now.&lt;p&gt;iOS and Kindles and Java and everything else controlled by a profit-seeking corporation are all the same things to developers. Of course Apple markets your work to end users and pretends you&apos;re happy with your cut of the two billion dollars in app store revenue. That&apos;s like a dating site marketing you to other users.&lt;p&gt;The bottom line is this: If you are developing for a proprietary system, you aren&apos;t in the business, &lt;i&gt;you are the business&lt;/i&gt;. Trying to argue that Apple&apos;s proprietary system ought to be less closed or more free or have more pixie dust than Amazon&apos;s is wishful thinking. If you develop for &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; of these proprietary platforms, you are a sharecropper. You work at the landlord&apos;s pleasure to improve the land he owns.&lt;p&gt;Period.</text></comment>
<story><title>A Rare Disagreement</title><url>http://www.marco.org/3627726252</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jonknee</author><text>&amp;#62; So why aren’t those who are criticizing Apple for taking a 30 percent cut of subscription revenue criticizing Amazon? My theory: everyone understands, intuitively, that the Kindle is a closed proprietary platform; but many people view iOS (incorrectly) as a platform like the Mac or Windows, where third parties are free to do what they want.&lt;p&gt;This seems like laziness or intentional dishonesty on Gruber&apos;s part. There are huge differences between the two. The biggest being Amazon doesn&apos;t have a Kindle app ecosystem so there isn&apos;t the [huge] problem of requiring a subscription option (which is the real issue--charge 90% if you want, it just becomes unfair when you require me to use it). Amazon also funds the delivery of the content to the subscriber, which considering it&apos;s often over 3G can be considerable.&lt;p&gt;In the current state of things if you are a publisher with an iOS app, Apple changed the rules to either require you to cough up 30% of your business or stop being a publisher. Also, you get the joy of delivering all content, that&apos;s not included in your 30% vig.</text></comment>