Re: Taking on Google/Apple? Re: Apple AppStore revenues - 85%+ come from games

On 12/12/14 8:11 AM, Manu Sporny wrote:
> On 12/10/2014 01:47 PM, Anders Rundgren wrote:
>> These systems are proprietary, not publicly documented and
>> frequently updated as well as being owned and run by giant companies
>> that have all the resources they need and more.
>>
>> What exactly would we be selling?
>
> I don't super-providers are the customer here. I think the content
> producers are (video game creators, filmmakers, etc.).
>
> Having been in the entertainment industry (video games and music) almost
> a decade ago, I know that many of these organizations feel that a 30%
> cut is too much for effectively providing access to an online store with
> hundreds of millions of customers. If there was an standard way to do
> in-app payments over the web, I think they'd adopt that mechanism as well.


The original focus of this group, AFAI recall, included a strong 
statement of a goal that *individual* content creators (like the 
person that wrote War and Peace, or the one that figured out that 
E=MC2) will be invigorated and supported in an improved 
equal-playing-field web payment system.

In such an equal playing field, all creators of useful information 
would have access to controlling the sale and (through ODRL for 
instance) the copyright uses and resale of the information they 
produce -- whether they are research scientists, bloggers, musicians, 
journalists covering a dictatorship, software engineers, or whatever.

On reading Manu's response above, I must ask: has that focus been 
lost? Is this impossible? Is the group now only creating a structure 
for massive oligopolies who aggregate content?

If so, I suggest this is a mistake. The oligopolies will love it. I 
don't think the future of humankind will love it. I think it's similar 
to the climate-change/fossil fuels transition. Very similar: it's now 
widely recognized that even a mainstream investment model of the 
energy future points towards localized production in small nodes that 
contribute to the grid. I think the same thing will hold for the 
potential of human creativity -- a boy or girl in India with a 
smartphone and a new idea, a great idea, doesn't need Sony to broker 
them to Apple to broker them to us. Do they?

I'm not saying Sony and Apple need to disappear. Like Shell or Chevron 
-- we'll need them for fifty years or more. But subsidies (by 
government, by creative open-source engineers) shouldn't be channelled 
to them any further. The effort needs to go towards the new types of 
networks.

Sorry if that's out of line; maybe what's being done at the code level 
includes all of this. It's just that the last few months of 
discussions seem to point towards what the existing major software 
companies are doing, and how to help them, or at least not get in 
their way.

Somebody (I can't remember who) once said: "Money is like blood. Large 
pools of it are a bad idea."

My 2 cents. ;-)


Steven Rowat

Received on Friday, 12 December 2014 17:03:37 UTC