Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Apple's New Policies Prove Difficult for Some Developers

Ars Technica recently posted an update regarding Apple's changes to their app store policies.  Basically, "Anyone who sells subscription-based content outside the App Store must also use Apple's system, giving Apple a 30 percent cut."  This might not seem like a very big deal at first, but if you read that newest update from Ars, you can understand why some developers are pissed off.

There's a logistical problem with an app having to offer a subscription 2 ways -- through the app store and through their own transaction/subscription service.  How do you tell the user "hey, you need to choose how you want to pay for the exact same service either way, although one way gives Apple a 30% cut simply for our app being available on iOS."  For some developers, having Apple manage transactions is much easier, but other developers already have a revenue plan in place and Apple scraping 30% off the top can remove their incentive for having the app available on iOS.  Ars mentions two apps in particular, Readability and TinyGrab, two apps that could be very useful to iOS users but that won't be made available due to Apple's new policies.  I wouldn't be surprised to see things getting messy all over again when it comes to apps that allow access to Hulu, Netflix, Kindle, and other large services that many iOS users enjoy every day!

If you're still not sure why this is a big deal, let me offer an analogy to this situation to understand why some people are angry.  Say that a particular real estate company, Orange, owns 25% of the real estate market in a big city.  25% of all houses sold and all apartments/houses rented come from them.  Orange executives are sitting around trying to investigate "alternative revenue opportunities," and they realize that they're really losing out because every unit they sell spends all of this money on electricity, Internet access, and cable/satellite service, but that they never see a dime of that money.  But hey, they deserve some of that money because if they hadn't sold/rented that unit, those utility companies would never have gotten that customer!  Orange is in no way involved with these services aside from selling the house/apartment to the occupants who later purchase those services.  To increase revenues, they tell all of these utility companies that for every customer they got from an Orange real estate property (even houses sold several years ago), the utility company needs to give Orange 30% of all customer feesAnd if they don't comply, then they won't be allowed to offer services to all current and future Orange real estate customers.  Even if Orange couldn't do this with houses, it would be relatively manageable with a lot of their rental properties, which would be devastating to these utility companies.

Monday, February 07, 2011

Bill Maher on NFL Socialism vs. MLB Capitalism

A week ago on Real Time, Bill Maher had an interesting take on the Super Bowl in his segment, "New Rules."  It's only about 5 minutes long, so rather than paraphrase it, I'll just have you watch the video:





Bill Maher is an interesting person -- he usually supports what "the scientists" say, but at other times he just goes his own way regardless of what the scientific evidence says, as he does with vaccines.  Nevertheless, he still has some interesting moments on his show when he's not being too much of an ass.  He is a comedian though, and thus when he says things, you need to consider the legitimacy of those claims.


In this case, I decided to look at the list of winners for both the Super Bowl and the World Series.  I then calculated the percent of the total number of championship games that each team had appeared in and/or won (as a percent of the total, not of their appearances).  This information is summarized in the tables below, after the break.