Honestly I don’t understand all the complaining here. When you buy a drink in a bar, you can pay $5 and the profit is $3.50. When you buy a loaf of bread for $2, the cost to the supermarket is under $1. Everyone who opens a store and sells things is entitled to a profit, except Apple apparently.

If I had a product for sale and a company told me they would sell it in their store, and that they would provide millions of devices for people to effortlessly purchase it worldwide, and they would process all the credit card payments, and they would advertise my product in their store all over the world, the would provide all the customer service, and would only want a 30% of the gross sale, then I’d jump on it. Anybody would because that’s a sweet deal.

All the hand-wringing is about something else, and not because Apple is offering bogus terms. There’s nothing bogus about it. Is it just cool to distort things to feel a sense of outrage?

As a practical matter, I’ve purchased add-ons to iOS apps independently and LOST those add-ons when moving to a newer device or even resetting it. Letters to the vendors have gone unanswered. When I purchase items in-app, and move the app to a new device, the add-on is offered for free download again. I only have to buy it once instead of repeatedly. There’s something to be said for purchase protection, and vendors should be grateful for this level of customer service – NO extra charge.

As for your previous comment, those companies are considered agencies since they do not create the content but distribute it. Software as service would be an app like logmein which provides a service of their own creation and requires a monthly subscription to continue service.

Has anyone even spoken to the developers of these Apps to find out what is going on? Could it be that all this speculation has no data to support it?

Why? Because beating up on either Amazon or Netflix isn’t like beating up on a minor player like Sony. To the extent that people are buying iPads to read ebooks, they buy them for the Kindle app. The iBookstore probably has one-tenth the sales of Amazon’s Kindle store. The same is true of Netflix. People buy an AppleTV to get Netflix. They don’t buy one to get Apple’s limited video offerings.

Recall the late 1990s when Steve Jobs made a deal with Microsoft to ensure that the then-dominant Office suite stayed on Macs. Apple’s finances may be much better today than then, but if it wants to sell products, it needs the Kindle and Netflix apps just as badly.

Also, removing the Kindle and Netflix apps would create serious legal woes for Apple. Short-term they’d face a massive lawsuit from customers. In their ads, Apple has promoted their iOS platform’s wealth of independent apps, and two of the most popular are Kindle and Netflix. Removing those two would constitute false advertising and perhaps, if intent can be shown, outright fraud. Apple can’t point to the previous existence of vague rules as justification because in the past they’ve not interpreted those rules that way. What Apple has done, Apple must continue to do. I’d add that the same isn’t true of Amazon. The latter has always be careful to stress a Kindle’s limitations. There’s no false advertising and no fraud involved.

Even more risky in the long run, attempts to use market dominance in one area (iOS hardware) to crush competition in another (subscription sales) is a near-perfect illustration of anti-trust behavior. It’d be like Amazon buying UPS and then refusing to deliver a competitor’s packages without a 30% surcharge.

Consumers want a transparent and straightforward solution. Amazon is trying to provide one but Apple is making it difficult. I understand some of what Apple is trying to do and agree that some of it is good for consumers but there needs to be a better balance. For example, the same price everywhere rule lets the platform dictate who wins rather than pricing artifacts — clearly Apple thinks it has a better platform. Perhaps something that involves a smaller initial cut but adds a consumption fee would be reasonable. In that scheme, Apple would get <30% for purchases made from an IOS device but the seller would also agree to pay Apple for every page view for that purchase when the customer uses an IOS based reader (up to some cap). Apple would get nothing from page views from non-IOS based readers. That would encourage platform competition while permitting Apple to monetize their platform goodness. If the other platforms are good enough everybody wins. Apple would be placing the (pretty good) bet that it can stay ahead of the platform competition.

If you want your device, OS, apps AND content all to be controlled by Apple then you’re in luck. You’ll soon be able to watch, hear, read and use only what Apple says that you can.

The design will be good though, so I guess you’ll be happy.