Thursday, April 8, 2021 In its latest court filing, Apple gives the term "commission" a new meaning unsupported by dictionary definitions and commercial reality Sooner than I would have thought when I publshed the latest There's nothing wrong per se with Apple comparing the iOS app distribution situation to the old days of software publishing: I, too, remember the "shrink-wrapped software" business. You can find some game credits from the mid to late 1990s that list me in sales & marketing and localization functions (Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Starcraft, Diablo). In 1996, I served on the board of the Software Publishers Association (SPA) Europe, and even though the World Wide Web existed at the time, we were all still selling software in boxes. Apple accurately notes that consumers "had to drive to the store, find it on the shelf, buy it in the shrink-wrapped box, and load it up onto their device." It's also plausible that, according to Apple pointing to his testimony, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney "found it difficult to sell games through traditional retail channels in the early 1990s." At the same time, I also dealt with publishers, distributors, and retailers. I had to negotiate discounts, cooperative advertising allowances, or grant early-payment discounts when payments would actually arrive only months later, making mockery of the term. It wasn't a land of milk and honey for sure (though at least you had multiple retailers and not just one per platform)--and Apple has every right to point that fact out.