slaingod

I have a lot of problems with Apple’s recent policy decisions on a number of levels. But I wanted to explore how Apple’s decision affects them and their users in more detail. One of the reasons Amazon has been so successful is that they service the needs of the ‘long tail’, a term that describes how large portion of revenue comes from products with limited appeal or low volume sales. Amazon makes a large portion of its revenue from bestsellers clearly, but a big reason people come to Amazon is because they also have thousands or millions of other producs available that aren’t bestsellers. Books only a mechanical engineer or chemist would find interesting, or books only an orphan liberal secessionist immigrant Texan fireman would find appealing. If Netflix only offered the top 1000 movies, they wouldn’t be where the are today. Bing has also recently admitted that focusing only on high volume searches in an attempt tp compete with Google was a mistake, that they ignored the long tail of search questions is what is costing them now.

What Apple is doing is chopping off a huge chunk of that tail. Products that have limited appeal and low volume have a tendency to be of lower quality or polish precisely because of their small market. But to the people who need or want those products, functions or features, they are worth every penny and ‘polish’ barely enters into the equation.  Look at the continued use and effectiveness of command line/terminal tools: If polish and ease of use were the bell weathers, then they would have disappeared a long time ago. Obviously you can hide them away and make them less obvious, but making them inaccessible is a mistake in my opinion.

And Apple can make money and be happy with the large percentage of people who are only interested in bestsellers and say books sold exclusively at Barnes & Noble (not Borders or Amazon), to keep the analogy going.  But to the extent that they can get ‘authors’ to write books only available exclusively at Barnes & Noble, everyone else is worse off.

I’m not saying Apple is doing anything illegal, but it just seems wrong. Let your products succeed on their merits, not on whether or not you can craft the rules to benefit you more.