Comment by jashmenn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jashmenn | Hacker News Reader

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I think marco is totally right that this can only help instapaper in the long run. Let me tell you a story from my own experience:

My partner and I created an iPad game for cats. We wanted to get some extra marketing boost so we contacted friskies (purina). In Nov (2010) I exchanged a few emails, and talked to them on the phone about our game. I sent them a video and they told us they loved the idea and they would get back to us. Then one day, silence. We didn't hear anything for months.

Then a couple weeks ago they released the Friskies "Games for Cats" which are suspiciously similar to our game. The blogosphere exploded. "Friskies releases creative iPad game for cats" "Friskies is oh so clever etc."

We were pissed. But sales improved. A lot.

I tried to track their rankings so I searched for them on the AppStore. Hmm, thats odd. I couldn't find them. It turns out /they didn't make native apps/ they were "simply" HTML5 pages on their website that you open in browser [1].

So what was/is happening is people see "Friskies iPad Game for Cats" they grab their iPad and search for "game for cats" on the AppStore and then they find our game and we profit.

Also, most people who have cats and iPads don't even think to look for a game for their cat. So by Friskies putting marketing into this they actually increase the size of the market (to be honest, I hope they run a TV commercial advertising their "ipad game for cats").

Moral #1 of the story is: BigCo might steal your idea, but they will likely mess it up and it can end up helping you.

Moral #2: high water raises all the boats

[1] I realized HTML5 is a "real" app, but most normals don't yet view it that way. They expect to find apps in an app store.

UPDATE: formatting

That's a lot different than functionality being added to the OS. What Apple is doing is effectively what MS got in trouble for. Apple is adding functionality to the OS that exists as a standalone application out of the OS (this is probaby the main reason why antivirus doesn't ship in the box with Windows).

The question MS had to answer was if this functionality was crucial to the operation of the OS. The TCP/IP stack apparently was deemed so. IE wasn't deemed crucial.

The difference between MS and Apple is that MS had a desktop monopoly. Apple has no such monopoly in mobile devices. Although if Apple keeps touting their 90% tablet market share, they could inadvertantly put themselves in the middle of antitrust crosshairs again.

I know Marco has said that he would not use legal means to stop Apple -- but he shouldn't rule it out forever. Because trust me, Apple would have no problem doing it to him.

You're engaging only a facsimile of Marco's argument, which he frames in terms of Starbucks and indie coffee houses: yes, Starbucks put a lot of coffee houses out of business, some times in a predatory fashion. But the good coffee houses often saw their sales increase, sometimes dramatically.

Apple is educating Marco's market about deferred-reading. They are inevitably going to add far more people to the total market that they'll take from Marco. As the market expands, he needs to capture smaller and smaller fractions of it to remain successful.

Meanwhile, Apple may have also done Marco a positioning favor, by establishing a low end market that he can position a niche against. He calls it the "deluxe" market now (which it is; the $5 I spent for iP is some of the best money I've spent on the app store), but that also leaves an opening for a "Pro" niche that commands an even higher price point.

I'm sure this situation leaves Marco with a lot more teeth gritting than he hoped to have. I don't want to downplay the situation. But I think Marco's got as good a shot as ever to make something big out of iP; maybe an even bigger one, albeit with more alpha.

You're confusing Microsoft's illegal anticompetitive actions with their defense.

They tried to destroy Netscape through a number of illegal means. Their defense was to argue that IE was nothing more than a component of Windows, which was and is correct. If they had merely shipped IE with Windows they wouldn't have broken any laws, but that was never really the issue; it was only the issue MS wanted people to focus on.

Not correct. See my other response. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2627487

Microsoft had a very real monopoly on personal computers, and they engaged in illegal anticompetitive practices to maintain that real monopoly, illegal practices this simply wouldn't have worked in a fair market with real alternatives for consumers and manufacturers.

The only monopoly Apple has is a monopoly on iPhones. Their only interest is to make their product as attractive as possible in a market jam packed with innovative alternatives, and history is filled with instances where features are added to an OS at the expense of a previous 3rd-party add-on.

I don't think there is any comparison between Microsoft of the late 90s and any tech company today, when it comes to monopolies and anticompetitive behavior.

Wrong product. Apple itself states it has 90% marketshare in tablets.

If I were Apple legal I would advise against explicitly stating tablet marketshare.

Why? They have not engaged in any illegal practices—at least as far as anyone here knows—to secure this position, and the tablet market is in its infancy.

If the market were years-old and Apple was buying out competitors and paying retailers to not stock alternative devices, then there would be a problem. But they're not.

Why? They have not engaged in any illegal practices—at least as far as anyone here knows—to secure this position, and the tablet market is in its infancy.

This is something that people continously get wrong. What are perfectly legal practices for a non-monopoly may no longer be legal once you're a monopoly.

For example, if Apple had a monopoly on mobile phones it might be illegal for them to block "replicated" functionality in their app store. Today its perfectly legal, but in a monopoly situation, its not.

For example, one of the things that MS was accused of was not allowing OEMs to put Netscape shortcuts on the desktop. If Windows wasn't a monopoly that's a perfect fine requirement. And as it stands today, Apple has strict requirements for what can get preinstalled on their phone/tablet by carriers -- virtually nothing.

Another thing MS was accused of by Netscape was withholding technical information. Apple does this today. In fact the Camera+ app, not only had to find technical information w/o docs, but once it did find the information, Apple removed their app from the app store. Imagine if MS removed Netscape once Netscape found the info they were looking for.

MS was also accused of "Giving Internet Explorer Away". All of these new features in iOS are basically free. Again, giving away something at below "cost" is fine if you're not a monopoly, but might be illegal when you are one.

MS was also accused of making it difficult (financially or technically) to remove IE. Again, you can't remove IE in WP7 or Safari in iPad, AFAIK. Both perfectly legal.

Now I'm not saying MS was in the clear. They were in fact a monopoly and did these things. My point though is that Apple is treading this line with the iPad. With the iPhone they're too small of a market. But with the iPad being the dominant tablet (by a huge margin), they're behavior, which would be perfectly legal for the iPhone, is now questionable.

The point is that Apple isn't a monopolist. They like to inadvertently brag that they are, but they are not, thus any comparison with Microsoft's monopoly abuse is moot.

Factors to consider would be how do you market your product and how markets are defined.

Consumer end - we are the leaders in tablets Judicial end - we represent a very small percentage or personal computers which can come in tablet form

Absolutely. But the more they say things like "post-pc", having removed the word "Computer" from their company name, and that the tablet shares an OS with the phone, but not their PC, all together would begin to make a case.

I just think they'd be prudent to be cautious.

> What Apple is doing is effectively what MS got in trouble for.

Microsoft got in trouble for telling manufacturers not to ship Netscape.

That was one aspect. Here's some notes from the Real antitrust lawsuit, note that a big part of this is "universal distribution" and "pricing" (since WMP is free).

But here's a question for you -- do you think Verizon, Walmart, or AT&T can disable any Apple provided functionality and have Instapaper run on first use? If one of them found a way to do it Jobs would shut it down so fast that they didn't know what hit them.

"Real's 64-page complaint accuses Microsoft of "tying" its Windows Media Player to its Windows operating system, shutting out competitors such as Real and instantly achieving

"virtually universal distribution." From October 2001 to March 2003, for example, Microsoft's "tying" ensured that Windows Media Player was preinstalled on about 95 percent of PCs shipped, the suit reads. By contrast, it continues, RealNetworks' digital media player was preinstalled on less than 2 percent of the estimated 207 million new PCs shipped.

RealNetworks said Microsoft has failed to share important information about the Windows code, thus hurting the performance of its RealPlayer product. For example, Microsoft refused to disclose details about certain security features, preventing Real from using them directly, according to the lawsuit.

Other charges allege that Microsoft used contractual restrictions and financial incentives to "force PC makers to accept Windows PC operating systems with the bundled Windows Media Player and to restrict the ability of PC makers to preinstall or promote competing digital media players."

According to the suit, PC makers told Real that their contracts with Microsoft kept them from removing or changing the status of a Windows Media Player; promoting RealOne subscription services during the first run of a new PC; and providing a desktop icon for Real Networks. "Microsoft's agreements with PC makers are exclusionary and anticompetitive," the suit concludes.

The suit also says Microsoft's pricing practices stifle competition. It alleges that Microsoft effectively forced competitors to provide free versions of their software to compete with Windows Media Player--a practice that has resulted in significant losses for RealNetworks. "Microsoft's below cost pricing, separately or together with Microsoft's other exclusionary conduct, poses a dangerous probability of creating a monopoly in the digital media markets," RealNetworks said in the filing. "

The key difference is that MS _started_ to act like this when they achieved monopoly status, but Apple has behaved, in iOS context, consistently from the very beginning. You cannot demand Apple to allow preloading something when they are monopoly, if they did not allow that _never_ and were all the time very public about mentioned allowance policy.

Here's hoping Apple doesn't use their 95% market share in smartphones to force everyone to adopt their plain text website view as a standard.

Here's hoping they do get to 95% market share.

That lawsuit only got started after Microsoft had already lost the Netscape case, where their use of similar techniques was already ruled to be illegal.

But will people be unsatisfied with Reading List enough to bother looking for alternatives on the App Store?

Non-Apple platform sync seems to be the biggest missing feature, but what else is there that folks would pay for?

Figuring out what else Reading List is missing that users would pay for is precisely what Marco is going to have to do.

But that's where the broadened visibility will help significantly. With whole new classes of people discovering this category of App, wishing that it did X, and searching around for alternatives that provide X, he'll probably see an uptick in people asking him about features like X that he's in a far better position to quickly iterate around than Apple is.

Great point!

Off the top of my head, the big ones are offline reading, keeps your furthest-read position (especially across devices), Kindle integration. I'd pay $5 for any one of those alone.

The new features in 3.0 that Marco seems to think are the differentiating features are the ability to see friends' saved articles and editorial content. The editorial picks are pretty good, but nothing that you couldn't get with Reading List. The social integration works if you know people who have Instapaper.

But those first three are really the nicest bits, in my opinion.

Instapaper also works from any browser on any platform. I don't see that happening with Reading list anytime soon.

My partner and I created an iPad game for cats.

I have to derail here. What inspired you to do this? Sounds like a fascinating idea.

It was part art, part joke. It turns out, it also fulfilled a real "need" people had: an interspecies gaming experience with their cat.

I want to improve the cat/human connection by letting the human use the iPhone to control the mouse on the iPad. Keep a look out for that feature in the coming months.

EDIT:

The hardest part about adding that feature isn't the bluetooth communication between devices. (That's easy, Apple provides sample code.) Rather, the most difficult part is designing an interface that is easy to use.

I can't tell you how many iterations we've been through to design a way to pause the game that is 1) hard for cats and 2) memorable and intuitive for humans.

I call this the Game-For-Cats-Law-of-Touch-Screen UI: any UI feature that is too hard for a cat is too hard for your average iPad user.

I call this the Game-For-Cats-Law-of-Touch-Screen UI: any UI feature that is too hard for a cat is too hard for your average iPad user.

I am partly in awe of your skill and this extremely insightful comment, and partly terrified.

I can't tell you how many iterations we've been through to design a way to pause the game that is 1) hard for cats and 2) memorable and intuitive for humans.

Look in the app store for a Baby App called Rattle. It has a simple, effective way to get to the menu that babies can't do by accident.

It has a little "i" icon that, when held, brings up a non-obnoxious, non-modal, hardly noticeable translucent text message saying "drag this down with 2 fingers". Do so, and the menu appears. Do anything else and it reverts back to the game.

FYI, my (larger) dog CAN press both buttons at the same time.

Here's my smaller dog playing with a sound board: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshu/5702009514/in/photostream...

I think you forgot one thing, Apple is no Friskies my friend

Counter-example (massive): all the games made by zynga.

I think these arguments are best applied to situations where a large entity is stepping out of their core domain, or maybe more accurately into someone else's. Apple isn't likely to put nearly as much sweat, smarts, and energy into Read It Later as Instapaper.. Friskies employees have probably put less energy into their game than has been used to comment on this article... but Zynga's single-minded mission is to make very well-liked games.

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