On 05/29/2012 03:22 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
On 28/05/12 17:06, Anant Narayanan wrote:
Sure, let's go with this analogy. The key concept is that the
manufacturer has full control over who is able to distribute their
product.
No, they don't. They really don't. If I go to a second-hand bookstore,
the store has not had to ask permission from all the publishers before
stocking the books. If I go to my local Tesco and buy some cans of
beans, I can sell them in my shop without permission from either Tesco
or the original manufacturer of the beans. Even for non-tangible things,
First Sale says (or should say) that I can resell them without
permission of the original copyright owner. And the original
manufacturer doesn't get to set the price, or control the marketing I use.
That might be true in the UK, but in India manufacturers are free to
distribute their product exclusively through their own retail chains,
and it's perfectly legal. This does not apply to second-hand goods, of
course.
Let's try and get back to a high level. Do we want multiple flourishing
competing web app stores, or not? If so, don't you agree that this
feature works against that? If not, how is our store different in
approach to the Chrome, Apple or Google stores?
Yes we want multiple, flourishing competing app stores. No, this feature
does not work against that. There are several ways in which our
marketplace (and the apps ecosystem as whole) is different:
- The first big difference is that in Apple or Google's case there is no
other way in which apps can be acquired on their respective platforms,
so neither users or developers have any choice. Our marketplace is
simply one of many.
- A user is able to purchase an app once (from any store of their
choosing) and run it on any of their HTML5 compliant devices.
- A user is able to choose any dashboard/appsync provider (Mozilla will
provide one of each too). We've gone to great lengths to ensure that a
user's list of installed apps is disjoint from any particular store.
- If a developer chooses to submit an app to our marketplace, they are
free to use our in-app purchase system, or any other payment mechanism
of their choosing, for both free and paid apps.
- Developers are free to choose any store to submit their app to,
exclusively if they would like to (the default is non-exclusive).
That looks like an open app ecosystem to me.
The real competition between stores is going to be based around who can
attract the best paid apps and that in turn will be based on how
competitive the revenue splits will be, and is very likely to break the
30% "industry standard" that's in place today. That's the big picture.
-Anant
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