5 ms·

Which means steam couldn't be created now, which is a little disappointing

• save_ferris 7y ago
  Not true, theoretically they'd just have to sell their own products on another marketplace.
  • jimbob45 7y ago
    Or offer them at a discount with little to no advertising, which is basically what they did with Orange Box.
    • jrkatz 7y ago
      Or split into steam-the-platform-the-company and valve-the-games-company - and if that happens I predict half life 3 really will follow.
  • paulddraper 7y ago
    They'd divest the resources into Apple Apps Co., which would then be a Apple preferred partner on the app store.
• nostrademons 7y ago
  It's problematic because nearly every platform either grows out of an application or needs its sponsor to build the initial suite of applications on the platform. You can't get past the chicken & egg problem otherwise - platforms aren't useful without applications, marketplaces aren't useful without participants, and nobody wants to bother with a platform or marketplace that isn't useful. This is pretty easily worked around with a revenue threshold, though. If you own a marketplace where $25 is transacted annually and you want to participate in it, go for it. If you own a marketplace where $25B is transacted annually and you want to participate in it, there're some problems with that. This is already part of Warren's plan.
  • granos 7y ago
    It somehow feels wrong to tell Apple that they can't sell Apps in their own App Store.
    • nostrademons 7y ago
      ...which shows how ingrained the idea of oligopoly & big business is in the U.S. There's nothing inherently wrong with forcing Apple to divest their in-house apps. They did it before, when they spun out Claris in 1987. Likely, it would lead to better competitors within those markets than we have now; there was a renaissance in Mac office software after Claris was formed, which unfortunately Microsoft won. Perhaps if Microsoft had also been forbidden from building apps for their own platform, we would still have functioning word processing and spreadsheet markets. (Though remembering this time period, I can think of another problem: file formats. Having a choice between MacWrite, WordPerfect, Ami, and Microsoft Word was great. Having to share your MacWrite files with someone using Ami was miserable.)
      • smallbigfish 7y ago
        We had a good "word processing and spreadsheet market". But somehow people and companies voted with their money for Microsoft.
        • jedberg 7y ago
          No one liked Excel better than Lotus 1-2-3. They picked Excel because it worked best on Windows because it used private APIs and also because they would be sold together. My dad had quite a lucrative decade as a consultant moving people from Lotus to Excel, and every time he was hired the people hiring him would complain about how they were being forced to move to "crappy Excel" because of the purchasing department.
          • scarface74 7y ago
            If that’s the case, why couldn’t Lotus compete with Microsoft on Macs - even though they tried? Excel was a better product. Just like people love to wear rose colored glasses and pretend that the only reason that Netscape lost was because MS was unfairly competing, forgetting that NS was so crashed prone that it was a point of nerd pride on Usenet how well an operating system could handle a Netscape crash.