Amazon sells ebooks for the sake of selling ebooks - to make a profit.
Apple sells music as a tie-in for its hardware offerings - it has no reason to "squeeze out" competitors in this space.
Don't disagree with your point on Apple but worth saying if Amazon's goal is to make a profit it's doing remarkably badly.
On a turnover of around $60bn it makes a profit of about $90m. Given that it's nearly 20 years old and beyond the point where it should be struggling to break even either it's doing a very bad job of being profitable or being profitable isn't the companies primary goal right now.
To me it looks like they're managing profit to zero to continue the land grab.
Now that may be legal and fair and in the short term it's good for consumers, but in the longer term I'm not sure it's good for the market (and therefore for consumers) given that most of it's competitors have shareholders who probably do expect profits.
Amazons goal has to be profit eventually, or there is no point being in business.
That they make razor thin margins now, is just evidence they are still undercutting the smaller competition until they're the only player and can set prices to what they want.
Sure there are a number of competitors, but iTunes still dominates when it comes to dollar share of music purchases. Regardless of their intention, Apple has certainly "squeezed out" most of the competition, and remains the dominant platform for purchasing music.
Similarly, there are still options outside of Amazon when it comes to eBooks. There's Nook, Kobo, iBooks, Google Books, Sony, and others. So Amazon's desire to make profit hasn't completely wiped out the market.
So this argument does not really hold in either direction...
>Amazon sells ebooks for the sake of selling ebooks - to make a profit.
No, Amazon sells ebooks for the sake of selling Kindles first and foremost (or did, before the launch of the iPad). Before the switch to the agency model, Amazon sold many ebooks at a loss. They sold ebooks at $9.99, less than what they paid publishers per copy for popular books.
Hold on. Apple has huge incentives to push content competitors off of iOS. It dramatically increases the switching costs to other platforms (see: video in particular).
And while pushing competitors off of iOS technically might not be squeezing them out of the space, it is still awfully damaging - especially when backed up by something like agency ebook pricing.
I would think a lot of those online music stores get sales by selling at a lower price than Apple. If Apple had the same kind of MFN clause that they had for books, that wouldn't have been possible. Apple probably thinks it was a bad idea to leave that hole open for the music stores, which is why they closed it for books.
