[jetti]

The difference is that Netscape Navigator was a paid application. Microsoft was bundling their product, which was free, with their OS. They OS was dominating the market, which meant that majority of people didn't have to buy from Netscape. They were forcing out the competition.

When Apple, Google and Amazon are releasing unrelated services into their platforms it isn't to starve out competitors but just expand their business. They aren't, as far as I know, drastically undercutting the prices of their services to levels that aren't sustainable for other companies to compete.

[JangoSteve]

> They aren't, as far as I know, drastically undercutting the prices of their services to levels that aren't sustainable for other companies to compete.

The linked Spotify page says exactly the opposite.

> Because Apple Music doesn’t have to pay the 30% IAP charge, they are able to hugely undercut us and charge €9.99. To our fans, this just looked like we were ripping you off

[chipotle_coyote]

This particular part of the argument doesn't make a lot of sense to me, at least looking at the US pricing. Apple Music is $9.99 a month; Spotify Premium is $9.99 a month and includes Hulu. If not paying the IAP charge means Apple could "hugely undercut" Spotify, then shouldn't Apple Music be, well, cheaper? By at least 30%?

(N.B.: I'm not defending the specific 30% cut that Apple takes or any of their other demands, just going "hmm" at the bit you've quoted.)

[lifekaizen]

Spotify is saying they had to increase the price to $13 to sell on the store. This price was not popular so they left the store to maintain the $10 price across the board. This was back in 2016, not what is offered now.

> 2014 June > So, we give IAP a try. That means we are now charged Apple's 30% tax and sadly have to increase our price for our fans... to €12.99 a month.

> 2015 June > Because Apple Music doesn’t have to pay the 30% IAP charge, they are able to hugely undercut us and charge €9.99. To our fans, this just looked like we were ripping you off

> 2016 May > We opt out of Apple's payment system and the artificially uncompetitive price we had to charge for using it

[ac29]

> Spotify Premium is $9.99 a month and includes Hulu

That's a very recent promotion (like, this week), and is the Hulu plan with ads [0], which has a marginal value of $0 or less in my opinion.

[0] https://www.spotify.com/us/hulu/

[jetti]

I was responding more so to the bundling of services rather than to the App Store specifically. Though, you could argue that the App Store and/or Apple Music are services that are bundled

[oarsinsync]

> They aren't, as far as I know, drastically undercutting the prices of their services to levels that aren't sustainable for other companies to compete.

Difficult to compete with free on a large scale, you can only compete on niche audiences at that point. Gmail feels like a good example here that effectively drove out most of the other competition's relatively limited free tiers for personal users, leaving only larger businesses and privacy-oriented individuals to continue to pay for email.