So you dump the BES and use an MDM server that talks to Android, iOS, and Blackberry. There are plenty to choose from.

Gosh, that was hard.

Or, they will do what enterprises across the world are doing - open up a secure way for Android (via Touchdown, but some devices do whole-device encryption to a standard that counts now) and iOS to collect mail / contacts / calendars through MDM profiles, and when everyone switches away from Blackberry, shut down their BES environment and count the savings.

We did that last year in this here Fortune-20 company. The users love it, because they get to use a device they actually like, which they get to go out and choose. The bean counters love it, because we're not paying out the ass for BES and corporate-owned Blackberries that get dropped / crushed / lost. Instead, it's an easy-to-budget stipend to approved users, and a one-time capital cost to stand up the MDM solution, with a small recurring "annual support agreement" expense.

They did this for Mac OS X back in 10.5 when they got their official UNIX stamp. Not surprising that they would go after an organization that literally prints money to spend on stuff.

1. The movie industry is constantly getting their stuff taken down, but at a rate that is slower than it gets put back up. That's clearly working very well for them.

2. It's not likely they would file a DMCA notice this is an Irish citizen and an Irish judge in an Irish court, and the DMCA is a US law. Also, it's a copyright law, and this isn't a copyright action. The judge could attempt a restraining order, but those need to be targeted; and good luck with that on the Internet where jurisdiction can change faster than most people change their socks.

Come on, the damn summary already provided an Apple product that shipped for a decade or so that uses this idea.

I know that this is Slashdot, where nobody actually reads the article, but it's in the summary!

So, does Amazon now get to sue Alcatel-Lucent for the amount of their settlement, as they were being extorted for greenmail on something that now doesn't exist, and isn't enforceable?

Let the blowback begin!

So, a match made in hell then?

Yeah, it's easy to be the fastest growing when your installed base is barely above a statistical rounding error. You should consider getting a brain transplant - the one you're using seems to be defective in logic and math.

Or you're a paid shill. Your choice.

Let's say the eBook market before Apple's entry was 1,000 sales (it wasn't, but it makes the math easy), and they had 90%. That means they sold 900 eBooks.

If Apple enters, and the market increases by 50%, and Amazon still sells the same 900 that they did before (assuming flat growth without the customers Apple brings to the market), then they now have 60% with the exact same amount of sales.

Market share numbers are useless without knowing total sales volume within the market, and period-over-period growth numbers.

when in reality it was simply Apple making sure nothing ran on Apple hardware that they didn't get a cut.

Yeah, it totally sucks that I can't run Flash and Silverlight on my Mac. Oh wait, I can install both with zero restrictions outside of Adobe and Microsoft's license agreements. Apple sells more than the iOS devices.

Regardless, Flash is still a huge piece of shit, and everyone should be happy with it's demise. It's a zero-sum change moving from DRM in Flash / Silverlight to DRM in HTML5, except that it's no longer a framework owned by one company who can decide if they are going to develop for all platforms or not. Remember how long it took to get useable Flash on Linux? Won't have that problem with HTML5, since it's a specification and not a product.

If someone bought from Amazon before Apple got into the business, and then continued buying from Amazon after Apple got into the business with the same or lower prices, how did they get hurt again? It's not like e-books are a finite commodity.

You might be able to make an argument for Amazon getting hurt, but I don't see it for the non-Apple customer.

I have a feeling that you'll see more genuine Google apps on the platform, when the platform has a market share worth developing against.

Google isn't a charity - they aren't going to spend the time developing an app for all 20 users of Windows Phone when the web pages also work.

(Yes, I'm being a bit snarky with that last line, but the concept still stands)

Geographic pole, not magnetic pole.

I stubbed my toe this morning. I'm pretty sure it's because the geographic poles shifted just enough that the door jamb of my bathroom was rotated axially just enough that my half-sleeping autopilot state didn't account for the drift, thus my little toe tried to occupy the same space.

Fucking global warming stubbed my toe!

That would be global de-worming, which sounds like some kind of initiative to save the pets of the world.