It's interesting that app stores rose in the 2000s when we were at the tail end of selling software in boxes. Margins on packaged software were often 5-15% at the distributor level and 10-25% at the retail level for consumer software. For enterprise software, it was customary to make 40% on the first license and 10-20% on upgrades. So, the app stores aren't too far off of what the reseller share would have been...
That was the original argument by Steve...But imagine a world where you couldn't just give software to someone you know without going to the big box store, giving it to them first and agreeing that if the other person wanted to pay for it the store would take 30%? Even worse, the big box stores back then also bought shipments ahead of sale and managed inventory, sales, and the like. The publisher would pay production and take B2B orders at a 30% cut or so.
The issue is that they both are asking for 30% while doing basically little to nothing to deserve it (with the app store netting very few devs any sort of promotion value), applying the rules to only some companies, while also outright banning the sale of software elsewhere.
Maybe this is fair in a small company but in a large company that controls 70% of the US market? Thats borderline like setting up a tax on an entire industry as if your company was a state in the US.
