Challenge accepted.

| If they have their own bookstore they're trying to run why should they enable a competitor's in their own home?

If Microsoft spent so much on R&D for Windows 95 and IE, why shouldn't they build it into the OS? Why shouldn't they lock down their APIs to make it difficult to make competing products inside their OS?

Really?

I think your argument is flawed (though I also think you are making two somewhat related, yet different points). It isn't about building it into the OS, it's about allowing competitors to provide a service to 'your' users.

Microsoft didn't prevent any browsers from being installed on Windows, they didn't require any special processes or try to prevent any competitors from offering competitive or superior services. Microsoft just figured if the baked in stuff was good enough, most people wouldn't bother to change, and they were right.

I could would agree with Apple taking a cut of in-app purchases where billing is completed through Apple's infrastructure, but forcing application builders (your community builders) to hamstring their products or pay you a cut is anti-competitive in a sense that I think is worse than anything Microsoft has done.

Microsoft helped foster innovation, and then stole it and made it difficult to compete, but you could compete. Apple is just hamstringing the competition so that they can't compete.

Forget IE, Microsoft put a lot of effort into Windows Media, Zune, ... Why should they make it easy for Apple to sell music on Windows?

Interesting approach, but the problem here is Apple doesn't sell books on iPhone (or rather 3rd parties do and they don't do a very good job of it). This is more like a retroactive, me-to I want that market move. The Kindle app product is far superior for reading as I understand. If you're going to release a platform, you shouldn't be doing this kind of stuff. It's a similar situation as net-neutrality.

Did he ever manage to republish the articles? Doesn't look like it.

I also read the patents, and to me, it sounds like Apple has patented both the smart phone, and applications that use a network.

You can use the web player through safari.

I think it's generally accepted at this point that the WSJ has become the conservative mouthpiece of Murdoch since it's acqusition in 2007.

Circle jerk reddit posts on HN?

There is a lot of things that Facebook won't do that Google+ can do. The reason managing friends lists in Facebook is so god-awfull is because Facebook wants it to be. There is also several other interface eccentricities put there to make the site harder to use in certain ways. The reason for this is to protect their user data and make it hard to corrupt or hide it and make it easy to expose it and add to it.

The bottom line is Google+ will probably serve ads programmatically, leveraging AdWords and other similar automated technolgies within the company. Facebook has nothing like this, it sells its user data to 3rd parties who could be doing anything with that data.

I'd just like to correct that last point.

Facebook doesn't sell any data about its users.

You are delusional. any data? Facebook doesn't sell any user data? Not only do they sell user metrics, they sell actuall user generated content.

They don't sell any data.

Shortly after the lists became hard to get to my usage dropped. Too hard to categorize my give a shit levels.

Ok, because the implied situation in the article is the LightSquared is pooping all over the GPS spectrum and then selling licences to manufactures for their spiffy new GPS service which happens to work much better than old GPS now.

Nope, more like GPS guys built a luxury spa in the middle of a farming area, and are complaining that LightSquared is pooping all over the field they [edit: they=LightSquared] just purchased upwind, which has been wildflowers that spa patrons could trespass through on on illicit trails until then. And LightSquared is saying "guys if you make this simple wall on your own property, the poop smell won't blow that far."

And to bring my analogy one step further, the GPS guys are saying "that wall is too difficult to build." [I cannot speak to how hard that wall is to build.]