loewenskind

>But having a monopoly in the mobile app market does give Apple a monopoly.

They don't. Doesn't Android actually have more apps in their app store? It really is what the parent said: the Apple market place is just better, it's not any kind of monopoly.

If we ever get to the point that jobs aren't replaced that would mean that all work isn't needed so the typical rules of capitalism no longer apply.

Capitalism is just a mechanism for allocating resources, it's not any kind of moral judgment on anything.

If last.fm, etc. are providing so much value why are their margins so thin? Are they providing value less than 30% of the cost of the base product?

You can't possibly be serious. You don't know of Microsoft's long history of copying software that other companies had made, putting them out of business? And three other people as well apparently.

This sounds a bit hyperbolic. The company that is notorious for doing this is Microsoft.

Personally I would prefer Racket over Guile, but if it starts to keep its promise about becoming the scripting language for linux then I would get more interested.

Any link for all the things that have started to happen with it lately for those of us who are out of the loop?

I can understand Apple wanting to cut out middle men. I've never been a big fan of middle men myself, for the most part. But the biggest thing that bugs me about this is: iBooks doesn't have any books where I am! I buy all my stuff on Kindle because it's the only place I can legally buy a book at all. They can't try to shove everyone off the platform when they don't have any viable alternative themselves.

Simple solution: sell your crops where it is most profitable. Maybe with 11x normal it's still worth it. As soon as it's not, you switch.

>It's deeply disturbing that the people at Apple feel entitled to radically change the rules of the game whenever it suits them.

What makes you think that's what they're doing? It could also be that they never intended for their platform to be used this way but didn't explicitly deny it because they didn't see this coming. I don't have any way of knowing that is the case, but I don't think you have anyway of knowing your opinion is right either.

Couldn't disagree more. The "all apps should be web apps" movement is just an attempt to return to dumb terminals. Now the pendulum is swinging the other way again, but this time "fat client" apps can just be nicer front ends to web services.

Personally, my strategy is to create my product as a REST web service and provide some kind of default web interface, but let native clients use the REST interface to provide a nicer experience where applicable. I.e. the HTML interface is just one possible "view" to the service.

Why does my native app have to be the completely generic web browser native app when it could be a specific "web browser" custom tailored for my specific service?

If people are using apps because they make more money with them, then what is your basis for claiming web apps are superior?

If you don't have speech without consequences then there will always be things that need to be said that can't be.

Looks like you're getting a bit defensive for some reason. I was using "you" as a generic pronoun (I could have said "one would be" instead but that's more wordy and is IMO less clear).

You make some good points but I think you're underestimating the power a monopoly can have. It's true that IBM wasn't able to keep their strangle hold on technology, but Microsoft did for a long time. Walmart still stands largely unopposed.