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Comment by moystard | Hacker News Reader

This article does not mention that the Minitel was a rip-off. All services were extremely expensive (3617 being the most expensive, at around 1€/minute). It was also investing on people's credulity at the time: for example, expensive Minitel services avdertised in video games magasines targeting teenagers.

And for information, Free is not the largest ISP in France, Orange is.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_%28soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9%29

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.. and thus, the analog with the modern App Store is complete.

Explain? The Appstore is the cheapest way outside open source I can get polished software and games at the moment. For a lot of great products in there i'm not even sure how the creators of that software can survive considering their pricing. Of course there are exceptions, but you can use most of those exceptions for free or less than the cost of 1 cup of coffee in a coffeeshop. So what do you mean by analog? E1 per minute to use (use!) or free/almost free to use?

Perhaps he was referring to the games which convince credulous kids to spend hundreds on in-app purchases?

Yup. The modern App Store highlights the exploitative nature of this business - just as MiniTel did, too, in the 80's .. Microsoft in the 90's, perhaps .. and so on. Sobering truth: there is a lot of crud software being made in these markets.

I agree with you as long as we are talking about mobile application stores. The Mac store proposes a lot of over-priced applications, including many applications that used to be free prior to the store release.

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