Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
@pwalker8
You said:
Fizzy Water asked:
I would genuinely like to understand your reasoning. It just doesn't seem rational. You assume that had the case been dismissed we would now have several ebook stores. And that these ebook stores would be not just competing but furiously competing. How? Certainly not on the thing that is of major concern to the vast majority of customers, price. Certainly not on the quality of the books. There is simply no scope for meaningful competition amongst retailers let alone "furious" competition.
Please stop your evasions and answer the question asked. I'd really like to know!
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You know when you start with the "are you still beating your wife" type phrasing, you make me think you are less interested in an actual answer and more interested in scoring points.
Yes, I assume that if the case had been dismissed then Apple would not have simply thrown their hands up and said "this isn't worth it" and put up a minimal ebook store. It seems a fairly safe assumption since they were putting quite a bit of effort into it before the case.
You make some rather silly assumptions there. You seem to think that the only way to compete is via price. Apple has never competed on price. Back when B&N was doing well, they never competed with the discount book stores on price, they competed on a combination of price and experience. The whole point of the open market is that different companies compete in different ways. Some compete purely on price, others on convenience, others on customer experience.
My assumption is that Apple would have competed on customer experience. iTunes was never the cheapest way to buy music, it was the most convenient way to buy music. Amazon could never get past the music convenience issue with their music store, even though they had DRM free music cheaper than Apple for a while.
What the market would have looked like now if the case had been dismissed or had never come up, no one knows. Maybe Apple would have made the same mistakes that B&N did. I rather doubt it, but you never know. I will note that when B&N and then Apple entered the market, Amazon's market share fell 20 percent. There was opportunity there. So, yes, I do think there would have been more competition. Why do you think there wouldn't be?