A recent example of a failure to gain class action status against Apple was the complaint filed by two photographers over the jargon ‘millions of colors’ regarding Apple monitors and screens. They said the term of art was misleading. However, their lawyers were unable to scare up many, if any, other consumers who believed they had suffered economic damage as a result of ‘millions of colors’ being a term of art. The lawsuit did not become a class action.

Class actions are almost always financed by lawyers, who actually shop for plaintiffs by advertising for them. The woman probably has nothing to lose (and little to gain, compared to the attorneys).

Second, there’s nothing illegal or wrong about being a monopolist. Every company wants a monopoly, that’s the goal: acquire more and larger shares of your market. Illegal use of monopoly power is where you get into trouble, a la Microsoft.

It’s the same stuff they do in political journalism - always trying to connect things to make other things. But sometimes those things just don’t exist, and you can do a lot of harm doing what amounts to lying, or falsifying at best.

Dan, you’re better than that!

Developers set the price of their applications on the App Store. Apple just take 30% of whatever they set, as far as I understand it.

Apple keeping the prices low for the iTunes Store also means they take less margin from each sale. And, seriously, do you think the music companies would have done a better job than Apple with the iTunes Store? The answer is clearly no, they wouldn’t.

They were so scared of big bad unauthorized copying that they gave Apple the keys to the kingdom, without even knowing it.

Good dissection, Ryan.

His use of Vudu as an example of the darkside of Apple’s rise puzzles me. If Vudu is a failing business because of AppleTV + iTunes, than I ask — so what?

The AppleTV is a fundamentally better product. It has an incredible media library to select from: iTunes music, movies, TV shows, and podcasts; Flickr for photos; YouTube for video; and your own personal music, video and photo libraries, and it makes it really simple to set up and use.

AppleTV is powerful because it is an all-encompassing solution. You can listen to your music library, watch your video library, see your photos, buy from an incredible selection of music and select from a quite good selection of TV shows and movies, all on your home theatre system. It makes your computer and home theatre play together almost seamlessly, and that’s powerful.

Vudu lost because it cannot provide an equally valuable product. It cannot give consumers the same incredible choice of music, video and podcasts that Apple can. The “trade-off” is you must work within Apple’s ecosystem, which is what Lyons is really afraid of. But like anything, when you decide to use iTunes and buy an iPod, iPhone, or AppleTV, you are deciding that the incredible value Apple’s ecosystem provides is worth giving up some mobility. If consumers decide the tradeoff is no longer worth it, Apple will not do as well as it has, and other media “stores” will take their place.

Lyons is concerned that Apple, given this power, will use it to abuse other companies or their customers. With the iTunes Store, however, Apple has been fundamentally fair, both to media owners and consumers. Apple takes a relatively small cut of media sales, and has fought to keep music and video prices simple (but has had to relent on movie prices with newer releases costing more than older titles).

There are concerns with the new App Store, as many developers have explained, but these concerns seem more to be growing pains of a new model than a sinister plan for domination cooked up in Jobs’s office. Perhaps because Apple is concerned more with hardware sales than media sales in the iTunes Store, but Apple has acted to help the consumer rather than harm.

So, I hope Lyons does bring back FSJ, because he does a much better job with satire than standard analysis.

Further untrue, of course, if you account for plenty of old geezers like me who have filled their iPods with stuff from their massive, massive CD collections. Apple didn’t sell me any CDs.