This is my earlier post, from a thread and story which now seems to have vanished.
The story goes something like this. You are Apple, you have a view of the market that says we own the customer who has bought our hardware. We should allow third parties to sell software to him as long as they give us a cut and and the purchase is exclusively through our retail store.
You miss your chance to implement this with the computer market, you failed to lock buyers of the hardware into your app store. In fact, you neglected to implement an app store, so you just sat there in resentful fury while third parties sold to your customers and took your rightful revenues. But then along came iPods, so you did iTunes, and that worked very well. So now along comes the mobile market and this time you are going to do it right.
At first everything goes fine, people buy the phones, use the store, you collect your percentage, and you also get the other thing you were making for, hugely successful sales and important market share. This is working just great, the share price soars, you get to lock in more and more of the collateral market at the same time as raising overall market share. Part of the reason the share price soars is of course that you have now realized Jobs dream. You are not only getting profits from your increased product sales, but also from the supplementary and service markets, and your costs on this last part are almost nothing. So your margins soar, and Wall Street loves that.
And then something nasty happens which you had never dreamed was possible. All of a sudden regulatory bodies start looking at your market share and wondering if its in some way dominant. They start deciding that it may be. But you can defend against this and are not too worried. But then they start looking at the very source of your industry leading margins, and they see that what you have managed to do is lock your customers into buying other products and services from you, and taking a cut. You are basically able to say to app developers that its your way or the highway. And, say the regulators, this might be fine when you were just another tiny minority player with a handful of fanatical fans, as you are in the computer business, but in the phone business you have dominant share of some segments and this is not on.
You are by now one of the leading two or three companies in the world in share price value, so you hire the finest legal talent there is, and prepare to defend.
Unfortunately for you this just leads one of the main market governing bodies, the EU Commission, to look carefully at their laws, and realize that your top legal talent is right, and you are going to be able to defend. But unfortunately for you, the Commission has the ability to just change its laws. Which it does, and then slaps a large fine on you.
Never mind, it may be large, but its peanuts in comparison to our revenues and profits, you think. Well, yes and no. Because what you have forgotten is that the EU has had its eye on you for some time. They have a similar attitude to their citizens as the one you have to your customers. Their aim is to run a closed market with only niche share to any other than local suppliers. Their intellectual heritage is Bismarck and Colbert. They have been looking at you for years now and trying to find a fight they could pick and win. And now they think they have found it.
So you are all sitting around a table in Infinite Loop Drive or someplace, and it slowly dawns on you in discussion that this might turn into a serious threat. Not just because the EU may fine you a meaningful proportion of your revenues this time around. But because they are now aiming at the whole business model which gives you all those free profits. And you need those free profits for Wall Street. It was never just the market share and the growth that was working for you. It was the whole model linking the lock-in to the growth and the high margins.
The EU, it starts to dawn on you all, actually has in mind to reduce you to Asus or Samsung or whoever. To being just another hardware manufacturer in a seriously competitive market.
So when someone actually starts up with their own app store, something which the new EU regulations fully entitle them to do, you have a problem. Let it go, and the world and his brother will be in there, targeting those nice margins. Block them, and the EU will be after you. What to do?
You have no choice. You have to take on the EU. Its going to take years, you will proceed through the courts, maybe there will be some kind of compromise settlement after which you will run it very close to the wind and have more court actions and more delays.
Your problem is going to be that Brussels is not California. But there is no point anyone telling you that, because after all, you are the team that took Apple to being one of the most valuable companies in the world. So what do they know?
Lay in some popcorn. Place your bets. This is going to get very interesting.