'On the news' captures my feelings towards the New York Times, the paywall and digital pricing fairly well:

Moreover, the Times paywall does not map to my reading behavior. I don’t read a single source for the news—I read thousands. I consume the news from all directions—from venerable institutions like the Times, to blogs that obsess over particular topics, to tweets from witnesses, and every imaginable source in between. I want news that is the aggregate of all these sources, that admits all of these varying (and often contrary) perspectives. Erecting paywalls between these locations misunderstands the ecosystem that each story participates in. The value I find in the news today is in its connectedness—in the ways in which often divergent sources come together to create a story—not its solitary authority.

The Times response to this is a porous paywall—what some have called a pay “fence,” either disparagingly or encouragingly I cannot tell. But I find the rules around how many articles you can view (and under which conditions) far too convoluted for most people to parse. People—myself included—frequently part with their money on the web, but only when it’s easy. If iTunes has taught us anything, it’s that easy beats free. For the Times to have spent two years working on a payment mechanism and missed that lesson does not bode well.

Similarly, the high price of their subscriptions seems to stem from the assumption that they will be the sole paper anyone subscribes to; they have presumed their position as paper of record. But the very concept of a paper of record no longer fits: there can be no singular story in a system of communication as diverse as the internet. In fact, it would be irresponsible of me to get my news from just one source. I still can’t forgive the Times for their negligent coverage of WMDs in the lead up to the Iraq War; but more importantly, I can’t forgive all the people who read only the Times and assumed that was all they needed to know. The world we live in is far too complicated, and the consequences of these decisions far too great, to trust the news from a single institution—even one as routinely great as the Times.

For me, the New York Times' value and authority comes from being widely read and cited, and anything it does to reduce the likelyhood of being widely read and cited reduces its authority and value. I do understand that newspapers are not free to run, and I do think people will pay to get something they value easily. The New York Times could be taking advantage of digital delivery to ensure that it has wider-than-ever reach, capture a smaller-than-ever fee, and become more profitable than ever. Instead, it's making moves to ensure that it shrinks, becomes less relevant, less part of the hyperlinked, social culture of information transfer, and fades away, a relic of the 20th century.

/via @marcoarment on marco.org.

Apple is both a platform (hardware and software) for selling applications, content and services, and a vendor of content (music, movies, books) for the platform. This puts them in competition, as a vendor, with some of their customers (as a platform), and sometimes that leads to conflict.

This is a topic that John Siracusa's been talking about with Apple's Strategy Tax, both on Ars Technica and on Hypercritical (with Dan Benjamin).

There's some interesting parallels with the inflection point reached by Netflix (as covered by Wired Magazine):

It had taken the better part of a decade, but Reed Hastings was finally ready to unveil the device he thought would upend the entertainment industry. The gadget looked as unassuming as the original iPod—a sleek black box, about the size of a paperback novel, with a few jacks in back—and Hastings, CEO of Netflix, believed its impact would be just as massive. Called the Netflix Player, it would allow most of his company's regular DVD-by-mail subscribers to stream unlimited movies and TV shows from Netflix's library directly to their television—at no extra charge.

The potential was enormous: Although Netflix initially could offer only about 10,000 titles, Hastings planned to one day deliver the entire recorded output of Hollywood, instantly and in high definition, to any screen, anywhere. Like many tech romantics, he had harbored visions of using the Internet to rout around cable companies and network programmers for years. Even back when he formed Netflix in 1997, Hastings predicted a day when he would deliver video over the Net rather than through the mail. (There was a reason he called the company Netflix and not, say, DVDs by Mail.) Now, in mid-December 2007, the launch of the player was just weeks away. Promotional ads were being shot, and internal beta testers were thrilled.

But Hastings wasn't celebrating. Instead, he felt queasy. For weeks, he had tried to ignore the nagging doubts he had about the Netflix Player. Consumers' living rooms were already full of gadgets—from DVD players to set-top boxes. Was a dedicated Netflix device really the best way to bring about his video-on-demand revolution? So on a Friday morning, he asked the six members of his senior management team to meet him in the amphitheater in Netflix's Los Gatos offices, near San Jose. He leaned up against the stage and asked the unthinkable: Should he kill the player?

By choosing to focus on selling movies, not making hardware, Netflix has integrated successfully with platforms far and wide, rather than encouraging themselves to focus on a single platform. As a result, you can watch netflix on iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Roku, computers, internet TVs, and other platforms of which I'm not even aware. This seems to have worked well for them.

This is a tricky situation for Apple to be in, and a line they have to walk very carefully if they want to remain effective in both businesses. It's not hard to imagine that being in both businesses makes it harder to be in each business. Netflix and Amazon/Kindle would probably be happier partners if Apple weren't also selling eBooks through iBooks and movies through iTunes. At the same time, Apple's ability to provide a very streamlined end-to-end simple solution for reading books, listening to music and watching movies has been key to their success in the past and probably the present, so leaving one business or divorcing the two businesses through some kind of a corporate split might well damage both irreparably. Having come this far, I think they have to stay the course.