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Emails Reveal Why Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller Blocked In-App Purchase of Kindle Books

aaadktda said:
No surprised but slightly irritated (for lack of a better word). If Apple would advertise their brand or products as a way to get the money and make shareholders happy it would be OK. You get this reaction from people because Apple says it does everything for the customer and to make the customers lives easy and bla, bla, bla. People are not reacting to the way they do business but to their hypocrisy and lies.
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I´d rather say people generally are clever enough to rate the products of any company in terms of their personal weighting mix of usefulness, usability, value, long term durability, repairability, ...
Some of these points might have degraded over the last years, but it would be arrogant to claim that Apple users are too dumb to notice (or just like the bling-bling shiny factor). I´d argue that atm the above mix is still regarded better than on other platforms (Android, Wintel machines). Otherwise it´d be hard to explain the continuing growth of sales revenue at Apple...
 
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Northern Man said:
Are you not following the story and Phil's comments prior to his boss testifying? Obviously not so catch up please before posting again.
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I think I am all caught up but Phil makes a lot of comments and I may have missed one. To which are you referring, specifically. I do not see any inconsistencies based on what I have read so far. Please enlighten me.
 
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Reactions: tongxinshe, decypher44, ader42 and 2 others
Honestly, I'm not surprised. Steve Jobs was a good businessman and in the capitalistic world this kind of behavior is encouraged and expected.

It's very telling that the media loves to put him on a pedestal, despite his obvious flaws.
 
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This isn’t something that the digital space or tech companies invented. It has been industry wide practice in department stores and concession stands. The tenant or licensee pays a percentage of the sale or floor rent to the property owner, landlord or licenser. If the landlord is also doing business on the same property then they have to control what the tenants can or can’t sell. An App Store’s business is modelled on department stores.

in shopping malls Apple Stores (all stores) are also bound by similar rules by the mall owner.
 
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ArPe said:
This isn’t something that the digital space or tech companies invented. It has been industry wide practice in department stores and concession stands. The tenant or licensee pays a percentage of the sale or floor rent to the property owner, landlord or licenser. If the landlord is also doing business on the same property then they have to control what the tenants can or can’t sell. An App Store’s business is modelled on department stores.
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Yeah, but 30% is a huge cut. Way bigger than anyone else on the market, so I can see why developers are complaining.
 
Reading these comments feels like walking into Bizarro Land where reality bends to the individual's desires. How can people read the same article and come to completely opposite conclusions based on it?

It seems to me that most people are forgetting that these emails and deals are from 2011. Remember 2011? When the iPhone 4 was out and the App Store was less than three years old, a very small market, and the number of non-fart apps was miniscule? Apple execs stepping in at that time to tell the developer of one of those large, actually useful apps to play by the same rules as everyone else or get out doesn't look to me like they were offering Amazon a "sweetheart deal" or anything close to it.

This refusal to care about facts and reality is exactly why the world is so messed up right now...
 
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Reactions: modernmeat, ader42, Marty_Macfly and 6 others
The content of the email or behaviour is not surprising. That's how things work. After all it's a profit oriented business...
However, recently claiming we "treat everyone equal" is a far mor current problem. Because it's now an even more obious lie. Right in everyones faces.

Anyway, it doesn't change the problem that software markets need regulation when they have reached a critical size or when there is no way around them.
 
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One of the singularly dumbest stances Apple has taken that marginalizes the iOS / Apple TV experience... (well then also, there was that hockey-puck mouse, now THAT was abysmal). Amazon (and others) sell ebooks, games and video rentals: let them sell in their apps without extorting 30%. It boggles the mind. Make it 3%, which might be digestible. It will bring more usable functionality to the devices, AND net profit from those individual sales.
 
BGPL said:
Apple - sticking it to their customers since 1977. And then blatantly lying about it. Repeatedly.
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But you’re still buying their products or are you just here on the forums to complain about how Apple sucks? I mean if you honestly feel that way why bother buying Apple products or being in these forms at all. Obviously people who buy their products must not feel this way unless they’re just some sort of sadomasochist that wants to cause themself pain. If people stop buying a certain brand then it has to change
 
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ArPe said:
in shopping malls Apple Stores (all stores) are also bound by similar rules by the mall owner.
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You'd think so... but the Apple Store I worked at for 7 years (which is today a stand-alone flagship on mall property), had "anchor store privileges" even when we were just a 30' storefront in the mall (back in 2007 when I started). We got to open earlier/close later as desired, mall security would bend over backwards for us. We let customer's non-assistance dogs in, even though the mall forbid it. That'll happen when you bring in $800M in sales per year and the pretzel stand is doing $300k.
 
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IsaacM said:
Yeah, but 30% is a huge cut. Way bigger than anyone else on the market, so I can see why developers are complaining.
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I wish I could agree but Apple’s maintenance, research and developments costs are huge. The 30% fee is first year only. In department stores and markets the floor rents and commissions that tenants and concessions pay rises yearly or on the next contract.
 
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drcre8tive said:
One of the singularly dumbest stances Apple has taken that marginalizes the iOS / Apple TV experience... (well then also, there was that hockey-puck mouse, now THAT was abysmal). Amazon (and others) sell ebooks, games and video rentals: let them sell in their apps without extorting 30%. It boggles the mind. Make it 3%, which might be digestible. It will bring more usable functionality to the devices, AND net profit from those individual sales.
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Sorry, but this doesn't make any sense. If Apple made a deal like this with Amazon, then that WOULD be a sweetheart deal, like the antitrust investigators are concerned about. Or are you suggesting that Apple do this for all store apps? In that case, what's to stop the App Store being flooded with app portals? All apps would then move out of the App Store into the portals, skirting both Apple's cut of ALL app revenue as well as its content and security controls. That would be the wild west.
 
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ArPe said:
This isn’t something that the digital space or tech companies invented. It has been industry wide practice in department stores and concession stands. The tenant or licensee pays a percentage of the sale or floor rent to the property owner, landlord or licenser. If the landlord is also doing business on the same property then they have to control what the tenants can or can’t sell. An App Store’s business is modelled on department stores.

in shopping malls Apple Stores (all stores) are also bound by similar rules by the mall owner.
Click to expand...
Isn’t it hard to compare physical and digital though? In many cases customers aren’t paying for an app that’s in the App Store. The app itself is free. Tim Cook himself said 84% of apps on the App Store are free. If I buy a magazine at Walmart and then decide to subscribe to the magazine to receive it monthly in my mailbox Walmart doesn’t get a cut of that monthly subscription fee I‘m paying.
 
Idk why I get such a kick out of reading Steve Jobs personal emails.... on another note once I wrote to Steve and he replied ! Not sure if it was actually him or not but I like to think it was....
 
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Blackstick said:
You'd think so... but the Apple Store I worked at for 7 years (which is today a stand-alone flagship on mall property), had "anchor store privileges" even when we were just a 30' storefront in the mall (back in 2007 when I started). We got to open earlier/close later as desired, mall security would bend over backwards for us. We let customer's non-assistance dogs in, even though the mall forbid it. That'll happen when you bring in $800M in sales per year and the pretzel stand is doing $300k.
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They have terms by the landlord regarding what they can or can’t sell. For example, if the Apple Store wanted to sell a range of apparel the contract, depending on landlord, will forbid them from doing so because the landlord’s other tenants such as Gap or Nike have licenses to sell apparel in the same mall or block. Those terms are universal in retail or markets.
 
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Reactions: decypher44
This is interesting and telling. I see no lies here... In fact none of them are talking about protecting bottom-lines, they are talking about the customer experience and not having people entering payment details all over the place. This is an important point to me...

I don't think you can argue that having a single "trusted" party brokering your payment details and protecting your data from 3rd parties with interests that go beyond just selling you a product, is a better user experience.

I DO think You CAN argue the 30% cut part for sure. But its interesting to read that they aren't debating that, seems like that is an answered question. As seen in previous emails.

In other complaints about Apple companies have used the argument that if they don't own the customers billing details they can't provide full support and customer experience themselves. To me this is a big factor here. It's less the 30% cut and more that 3rd parties want to have access to your payment details. This is the golden goose.

Apple is not squeaky clean here, but neither are the other parties. I am sure if they could, they would like to use the Apple platform at basically no cost and own the payment mechanism. Which would be bad for Apple customers and a crappy user experience.

Thanks,
James
 
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This is all interesting. I’m a long term user of book apps on my iOS devices. Books, Kindle and even Book, though I don’t use that as much these days.

amazon has a service that Apple should considering offering. For $9.95 a month I can read as many books as I want without further payment. Not all books fit into this, but a huge number do. i can keep up to ten at a time. If I want another, I have to delete one of the ten. The interesting thing is that if I want to buy a book, that is get a book that I have to pay for, the app says that this feature isn’t supported at this time, and I have to go to the Kindle site and buy it there, whereupon it shows up in my Kindle app on my iOS devices.

but, if I want a “read for Free” book that I can get with my Kindle $9.95 a month subscription, it takes me right there, to the Kindle store, where I delete one there that I’ve finished, and the book shows up in the app.

so this is an oddity. I am paying a subscription to Amazon through my Amazon account for the store, but I can access those books directly through the Kindle app on my iPad, though it takes me to the store. But I can see all the books Amazon has to offer through the Kindle app too.
 
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Um.... Leveling the Playing field was in reference to software developers, and in this case it would be for books publisher.

Not for another store.
 
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