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by throwawaymsft 4104 days ago
Imagine if Microsoft got a third of the revenue from Turbotax, Photoshop, AutoCAD, World of Warcraft, etc.
1 comments

A better analogy might be to ask how much Wal-Mart marks up software in their store. The answer is more than Apple does. Apple's value proposition is they bring x hundred million paying customers with credit cards ready to go into the store and you will sell at least 30% more than if they didn't bring those customers to you.
Is Wal-Mart's markup still bigger than Apple's once you take out the incremental costs of dealing with physical boxes in stores [1]? Considering the substantial markups we see on things like books and DVDs, I suspect not.

[1] To be precise we should also take out Apple's incremental (not fixed) costs for delivering apps, but I suspect those are negligible on a per-app basis.