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A couple tempests in teacups erupted last week (and I’m not talking about the financial doom we’re all about get smacked down by) and they struck me as very similar and very different. The first was the latest iPhone app ban, Podcaster, that went across the wires – this time, though, Apple banned them because they competed with functionality already on the iPhone. The second was a directed at the intensely awaited game from EA, Spore, which due to some objectionable DRM on the game has been receiving thousands of 1 star ratings on Amazon.com (as well as much resulting coverage in the realm o’ blogs).

Both events are public reactions to these companies’ desire to control their product. In Apple’s case it was preventing competition and in EA’s it was an attempt to prevent piracy. However, I suspect their longer term outcomes will be quite different.

Apple’s banning of apps has long been contentious (even though in one case, stupidly, the world seemed to be demanding that Apple do it). It had crossed over from the hope (or at least my hope) that it’d be banning apps on a technical basis to banning it on an arbitrary value judgement of its content and functionality. With this latest episode, however, it shows that it will physically (digitally?) prevent you from competing with it on the iPhone in any arena it wants to lay claim to.

Obviously, it has a right to do it. Whether it should have done it is up in the air, although, most fall on the side that this was not the right course of action for the good of the iPhone. I’m decidedly mixed on this after much thought – I think the fundamental problem is the lack of any guidelines or means to ascertain ahead of time whether an app could be banned.

Nevertheless, I don’t think this will have much effect on Apple. Arrington, who I don’t always agree with, says it best – developers are not going to leave the platform over this. There’s simply too many people, too much momentum and ultimately too much money to be made on the iPhone. The bans happen slowly and while it could happen to you (as a developer), statistically speaking you’ve got a pretty darn good shot of getting your app onto the system. At best I’d hope that Apple will simply provide better guidelines for actions it was going to take anyway.

On the flip side EA shows that there is some line that DRM can cross that will have their customers up in arms. In this case, amongst many other things, from what I can tell the bit that everyone hates most is that Spore can only be installed 3 times – as I understand it (not being much of a game player myself), due to problems, new computers, etc… games are often installed many more than that in the course of their playable lifetime. So there was an Amazon insurrection with over 2100 (out of nearly 2400) reviews giving it 1 star. I haven’t seen anything like this happen before.

It’s hard to say what effect this has had, initially, I didn’t think it’d have any effect at all. Looking at the Amazon bestseller list, though, it had started off at the top spot (and galaxy edition in the top 10), but moved down steadily. It had gotten down to 6 before Amazon “accidentally” erased all the reviews – they were later restored, but I saw Spore work its way back up to the 3rd position and has since fallen back down to 5.

What’s odd about this is that Warhammer: Age of Reckoning which I first saw in the second slot after Spore, moved up into the top slot and has stayed there. But I can’t imagine that Spore, which has a much more accessible, casual gamer appeal could have a more limited audience than Warhammer presales – it isn’t even out yet.

It seems that EA is already reacting to this with an announcment that its next game, C&C: Red Alert 3, will not have the same onerous DRM on it. It seems like only a marginal change – allowing up to 5 installs – but the press seems to be ok with that.

So why the difference between the two, where Apple gets away with it and EA doesn’t? Because one affects developers and one affects consumers. Apple’s decision affects developers primarily – most of its consumers won’t even know that anything happened. So they’ll keep happily buying phones and downloading applications. Which makes it difficult for developers to ignore the platform.

EA’s problem was one that many consumers would feel right away. So their response immediately hits EA’s bottom line. Until the iPhone userbase is directly and widely affected by Apple’s banning tactics (of course it is being indirectly hurt right now) Apple won’t feel compelled to change it’s ways. (Kind of awesomely, though, Podcaster is still selling using the iPhone’s ad hoc distribution method, but since that only supports up to 100 users, you know, I guess it can never be too big). What’s your stance on all this? Are you outraged or unsurprised (or both?) at Apple’s actions? Do you care about the DRM restrictions on Spore?