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Hewitt is dead wrong on his definition of middle men. They are there to facilitate and earn a profit. Nothing to do with lowering cost. They increase cost. Period.

Frankly, I think he's being a bit of a whiner about the whole thing. There are what, 100k apps in the store? If they weren't QCing it would be 1,000,000 and the percentage of shit apps would be MUCH higher than it is now (and it is through the roof right now).

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If the middleman brings more value to the end-customer than he increases the cost, then (s)he is a net win, and cutting the middleman out reduces the value to the end customer.

Note how that doesn't contradict what you say, which is still literally true; the question is whether your literal truth actually matters.

The Internet makes some of the old "easy" ways of being a middleman irrelevant and open the field wide open in a lot of ways, but it will never make it impossible for a middleman to bring more value to the customer than they cost. It's just that competing with "customer goes direct to the source" just got a lot harder.

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