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苹果新政策导致iFlowReader开发公司濒临破产

发布时间:2011-05-12 15:35:23 Tags:,

作者:Mathew Ingram

新政策产生时总会使得平台上某些业务受到影响,本周蒙受损失的是iPhone和iPad上的电子书应用iFlowReader。5月11日,运营公司表示正濒临破产,并将谴责的矛头直指苹果及其应用内销售30%抽成。借助苹果平台所带来的优势是很明显的,应用可以接触到大量活跃用户和内置付费方法。但那些在苹果高墙内活动的人,其不利条件也很显著,即商家对某些基础运营层面失去控制。

公司博文的字里行间透露出苹果骤然改变应用规则给iFlowReader带来的苦痛,在文中公司告知用户将在5月31日退出市场,对创新者来说这是个令人惋惜的时代。博文部分内容如下:“苹果制定的政策让我们无法继续生存下去。他们想要掌控iOS上的所有电子书业务,而且他们也有足够的力量单方面做到这一点。我们即将破产,iFlow Reader正在死去。我们完全信赖苹果,但他们的做法却让我们失望。”

公司还指出“代理模式”是导致其灭亡的另一个原因,许多书籍出版商获权进行销售,这让出版商可以用自己为电子书定价并付给销售方(游戏邦注:如iFlowReader)30%佣金的方法来出售书籍。代理模式的崛起也主要起源于苹果方面的做法,因为向出版商提供这种模式可以和Amazon及其在电子书市场的主导地位展开竞争。

iFlowReader

公司表示,代理模式和苹果30%应用内交易费用抽成的结合使得iFlowReader无法生存下去,因为他们的收益也就只有这30%。公司创建者表示他们花了上百万美元来开发这款应用,这些人断言苹果知道这种做法最终会扼杀iFlowReader的运营模式,尽管他们同意应用继续在商店中出售。以下是公司的博文内容:

“苹果可以随时改变规则,他们也确实这么做了。不幸的是,我们本应该清楚地知道苹果会这么做。在我们与苹果谈论这件事情之时,苹果iBooks已经处于研发中,他们肯定知道将来的计划会让我们遭遇失败,无论我们的产品有多么好。我们一点机会都没有。”

苹果并非唯一通过政策变更破坏甚至摧毁新兴公司运营模式的公司,Lendle的书籍共享服务近期也因Amazon忽然改变API条款而受到严重影响,服务现已停止。Twitter也曾强行限制对其数据的使用并关闭某些应用,这激起开发商的愤怒。但是,没人像苹果这样有如此大的力量掌控新兴公司的业务。

某些观察家指出,如果iFlowReader将服务开发出HTML5版本投到开放的网络平台上,或许还会继续生存下去,不应把所有的希望都寄托在苹果上。但是iOS平台实在诱人,iPhone和iPad的用户量急剧增长,进入其中的应用几乎在一夜之间便获得巨大的成功。不幸的是,正如各种媒体公司已经发现的那样,潜在的成功往往也会付出巨大的代价。这也是为何Fortune之类的许多发行商正在尝试基于网页的服务,而不是单纯依靠应用。

如果苹果不出台新政策,iFlowReader会失败吗?也有这个可能。但公司如此戏剧化地改变基于内容的应用制作者所使用的规则,这种做法足以将iFlowReader推向灭亡的边缘。理论上来说,这种事情可能发生在所有开发商身上。这便是苹果游戏的本质——专家总是胜利者。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,转载请注明来源:游戏邦)

The Danger of Playing in Apple’s Walled Garden

Mathew Ingram

Every so often a news item comes along that reinforces the downside of building your business on someone else’s platform, and this week’s poster child is iFlowReader, an e-book app for the iPhone and iPad. The company behind the app announced Wednesday that it’s shutting its doors for good, and it puts the blame for its demise squarely on Apple and its new 30-percent levy on in-app sales. The benefits of getting into bed with Apple are obvious: access to a huge universe of motivated users and built-in payment handling. But the downsides for those who play inside Apple’s walled garden should be just as obvious — namely, you lose control over some fundamental aspects of your business.

The bitterness that iFlowReader feels about Apple suddenly changing the rules of the app game spills out of every line in the company’s blog post, in which the company advises users that it will be “going out of business” as of May 31, and that this is a “sad day for innovation.” The post goes on to say that: Apple is giving us the boot by making it financially impossible for us to survive. They want all of the eBook business on iOS and since they have the unilateral power to get it, we are out of business and the iFlow Reader is dead. We put our faith in Apple and they screwed us.

The company notes that one of the other culprits in its financial demise was the “agency model” that many book publishers have adopted for sales, which gives the publisher the right to set the price for their e-books, and gives any seller (such as iFlowReader) a flat, 30-percent commission. The rise of the agency model is also primarily Apple’s doing, since offering that model to publishers was a competitive move against Amazon and the dominant position it had in the e-book market.

The combination of the agency model and Apple’s 30-percent fee on in-app transactions made it financially impossible for iFlowReader to survive, the company says, since the 30-percent charge “is all of our gross [profit] margin and then some.” And the founders — who say they spent more than a million dollars developing the app — also allege that Apple knew it would eventually kill iFlowReader’s business model, even while it was approving the application for sale in the Apple store.

Apple can change the rules at any time and they did. Sadly they must have known full well that they were going to do this. Apple’s iBooks was already in development when we talked to them and they certainly must have known that their future plans would doom us to failure no matter how good our product was. We never really had a chance.

Apple is hardly the only company that has destabilized or even killed a startup’s business model by making such changes: Another e-book player, the Lendle book-sharing service, got a nasty shock recently when Amazon suddenly changed the terms of its API and the service stopped functioning. And Twitter has also raised the ire of developers by enforcing restrictions on the use of its data and shutting down certain apps. But no one controls the purse strings of a startup’s business quite like Apple does when you enter the App Store.

As some observers have pointed out, iFlowReader would still be alive if it had also developed an HTML5 version of its service for the open web, rather than putting all of its eggs into Apple’s basket. But the lure of the iOS platform is great. The iPhone and iPad are huge growth engines, and apps that can tap into that have become massively successful almost overnight. Unfortunately, as media companies of all kinds have discovered, that kind of potential success comes at a great price, which is why some publishers such as Fortune are experimenting with web-based services instead of just apps.

Would iFlowReader have failed even without Apple’s new fees? Perhaps. But the fact that the company changed the rules for content-based app makers so dramatically probably pushed it over the edge, and theoretically it could do the same to anyone. That’s just the nature of playing Apple’s game — the house always wins. (Source: Gigaom)


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