Re: Epic Greed
I'm afraid that, while your previous comment was opinion based and subject to debate, you're either wrong or nearly so about a lot of the facts alleged in this one. Some of them are not relevant, but I will address them anyway.
"Apple did not start in 2007."
Original iPhone: Announced January 2007, released June 2007. If you're counting the partnership to have a phone with a music player, that was a commercial failure and they also didn't build it.
"Only after Apple's iphone was there an "apps" market."
Not technically, but basically true. Because phones sped up and now could run more complex apps. Hence my point that apps are very important to the viability of a mobile OS in the current age, as proven by Windows Phone, Firefox OS, and Ubuntu Touch (though that one is getting a bit of a revival).
"Apple created the home micro computer market long before the Apple II, one which other hardware vendors copied, the Apple II was an upgrade in that market rather than a new start."
Not really relevant to the point, but basically wrong. They built the Apple I before that, but they sold two hundred of them. That's not creating a market. That's producing an admirable technical achievement. They were instrumental to the market with the millions of Apple IIs that got released and others created it along with them.
"For a long time hardware vendors offered only an OS and a BASIC interpreter and that was what people wanted to buy not ready build software but VisiCalc changed the perception of microcomputing from "only for hobbists" to a business tool."
Exactly my point. VisiCalc, not Apple, was the reason the Apple II was so successful outside the hobbyist computing market. That and other software written for the platform because businesses had already purchased them to run VisiCalc. This is why the viability of a platform depends so heavily on the writers of applications for it, and therefore why it makes as much sense to ask Apple to pay their app devs as to go the other way (in each case, no sense).
"Apple have lead if not created a lot of the innovation of computing that the smartphone market relies upon, it was this that allowed Apple to change the the mobile telephone market away from the complete dominance of the cellular companies to one where not supporting Smart phone's was no longer an option."
They made a smartphone that people wanted, and that's basically it. You could give Android the same credit. That involved a lot of work, and I commend them for the product they made, but they got paid for that every time I and others bought an iPhone.
"As to software developers having impact upon sales, as I said this is all relatively new. The move away from bespoke system designers who would create both the hardware and software to only meet the customers requirements, to programmers who relied upon existing hardware platforms all happened after Apple's creation of the home computer market and before the Apple II."
No, it's relatively old. Bespoke systems you could argue was a lot of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, but that's still less time than we've had personal computers on which software written by others was loaded. That's if I concede the bespoke thing at all, because even in the 60s, people loaded their own code on mainframes and could purchase someone's program even though it only ran on a single type of machine. VisiCalc was selling Apple IIs by 1979. It has worked like this through all the decades following. Publishing software sold a lot of Apple's GUI-capable machines in the 80s and 90s, for example. Office sold a lot of Windows boxes. Custom tools which only run on Windows sell them now.
"Accessible hardware had to come first and independent software houses came much much later."
As in two years later, forty years ago. We've reached that point.
"As to gouging, this is what happens when the consumer has no choice, EPIC here are not the consumer and they always had a choice."
Wrong. Epic has no choice to get people to install their applications on IOS and users of IOS devices have no choice for where to get their applications.
"They chose the safer option of selling their software for other vendors hardware"
That's the normal choice. Few software companies sell software which could run on a computer on a single-purpose device. It's called a general-purpose computer because it can run most software, and it can. Microsoft does not charge you for having a Windows binary. Apple doesn't charge for having a Mac OS binary. Google doesn't charge for having an Android binary. In some cases, they may charge for the use of their stores, but in each of the named cases, you have the choice to eschew the stores and let users install the code anyway. Here is where IOS differs and causes the problem.
"and then tried to use political manipulation to improve their income against what they had agreed."
They didn't agree, they were given no choice. This was not a negotiation because Apple doesn't do those, and they had no other choice.
"For my part both sides are guilty of greed and stupidity,"
I agree here. Epic is not at all altruistic; they just want money. However, they want Apple not to take their money for purposes that have no legitimacy, so I am still reluctantly on their side.
"both chose to play dirty but for my part I still remember what Apple did for computing and that gives them much more leeway than what EPIC have done."
I disagree. Being nice once (for lots of money) doesn't mean you can be nasty later without consequences.