Even shorter TL;DR: Some news article claimed that launching a magazine only for Apple's iPad is not a good idea. Gruber comes to Apple's rescue and explains how it's The Daily's own fault if they failed.
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/11/27/chartier
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/11/12/drones-rejection
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/11/08/kontra-design
I do have to admit that he does take an unholy delight in mocking pundits, stock analysts, or those who play them on TV, who make stupid Apple predictions which prove to be stupid.
Somebody ought to. Tech pundits are no better than those idiot psychics that make a set of predictions every December for the coming year: Which celebrities will die, which will divorce, and so on. They're nearly always wrong, but when they catch a break and get something right, they boast about it for years.
Tech punditry is a noxious racket. I don't think we need fewer Grubers, or that Gruber should branch out and start serving claim chowder to the people who bash Microsoft, I think we need more Grubers calling these people out across the entire industry.
So the first person that should be called out by these "new Grubers", could be Gruber himself.
TL;DR Quote; This is what galls some: Apple is doing this because they can, and no other company is in a position to do it. This is not a fear that in-app subscriptions will fail because Apple’s 30 percent slice is too high, but rather that in-app subscriptions will succeed despite Apple’s (in their minds) egregious profiteering. I.e. that charging what the market will bear is somehow unscrupulous. To the charge that Apple Inc. is a for-profit corporation run by staunch capitalists, I say, “Duh”.
If it was Google or Microsoft which did the exact same thing, Gruber would've raked them over the coals for blatant profiteering and restricting developer freedom.
Not to mention snark against Google, Android, Motorola, Nokia, Amazon etc. like calling the pink Lumia lipstick on a turd. Only increasing his readership and RSS ad costs though.
Because the population of people buying a yearly subscription to a newspaper is quite special to begin with - if you are counting on the increased publicity by being in the app store to sell subscriptions, I think you are doing something wrong.
Of course The Daily probably made mistakes as well. But I'm very sure that the succesful models of the future will neither be Ipad only nor giving up 30% to Apple without adding much value to the customer in doing so...
The best thing I can say in The Daily's favor is that the app took advantage of the native frameworks for kerning and text layout, even if the hyphenation was screwed up.
For an app like The Daily to take better advantage of being a native app, there'd have be better tools available to content creators so that they can actually use those features. Camera input. Keyframe animations. Multitrack audio. Even, dare I say it, 3D content.
I know I only tried out the Magazine because it was so simple to subscribe - and just as importantly, I knew how easy it would be to cancel if I didn't like it.
I never read the Daily, but apart from the Magazine, all the Newsstand apps I've tried have been utter crap.
Of course that demographic is going to disappear and all huge newspapers have financial problems at the moment. But for example the NewYork Times web subscription has >500.000 paying subscribers... I don't know, paying 30% to apple for a better payment gateway seems just excessive to me.
From a purely economical perspective, this is a very good point....