The New York Times reports:

The company has told some applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store.

Apple rejected Sony’s iPhone application, which would have let people buy and read e-books bought from the Sony Reader Store.

This follows news that Apple is to block newspaper apps that enable people to view subscriptions for free through apps, and signals a shift in the way Apple deals with the App Store.

I’ve never had a major problem with the ‘closed’ nature of Apple’s store. Curation is a good thing, and despite the massive amount of crap on the App Store, the quality level certainly beats Android Market and its near-literal ‘anything goes’ model. But recent reports show Apple isn’t willing to give up its cut on anything it could potentially get a cut for.

The New York Times report is particularly worrying if it’s entirely accurate, in that it seems to suggest Apple will go further than it has before, blocking apps that enable access to any purchases made outside of the App Store. This would affect Amazon’s Kindle app and force users to use iBooks, which would hand millions of potential iOS users a damn good reason to seriously consider competing platforms.

My suspicion here is that the New York Times reporters don’t have a full understanding of the facts (and/or the underlying systems in the App Store), but question marks remain. After all, the Kindle system isn’t a million miles away from the newspaper subscription model that Apple is banning. However, I would hope that Apple isn’t going down that particular road, because making an enemy of Amazon (now the owner of Lovefilm, Apple’s biggest competition in digital music, and soon to open its own Android store) would be a bad move, and if Apple attempts to enforce its own systems and effectively ban the competition, it’s going to (rightly) get smacked hard by multiple anti-competition commissions and have the kind of PR fallout even Cupertino can’t dance around.

Update: ZDNet’s interpretation is along the same lines as the positive end of mine, thinking Sony submitted an app with IAPs, and that Kindle’s ‘buy through a browser’ model remains safe.

Update 2: Lex Friedman also thinks the NYT (via Sony) has its facts wrong. Lucky Apple PR’s there to answer our questions, eh?

Oh.

Update 3: Oh dear, Apple, what have you done?

DISASTER! SELL YOUR APPLE STOCK! Why? Because, according to Bloomberg and a billion other websites, Apple’s share of the tablet market has plummeted. During the three months to December 2010, Apple’s iPad grabbed ‘only’ 75 percent of shipments, down massively from the 95 percent it had in the previous quarter. Extrapolating wildly, analysts therefore predict Apple will within two years have a market share of minus 45 percent. ARGH!

Or, maybe—just maybe—what really happened is that Apple’s iPad had pretty much the entire market to itself at one point, and so got all the sales. And now there’s competition, Apple’s got less of the market. Of course, it’s a growing market, so Apple has a smaller slice of a much larger pie each quarter; also, it’s likely Apple’s profiting hand-over-fist and other companies aren’t, but SELL SELL SELL APPLE DOOMED OH MY GOD ANDROID FTW!

Oh, and  Neil Mawston, director at Strategy Analytics:

Even at $500 retail, based on some of the research we’ve done, that’s probably two or three times more than what most mass market consumers are expecting to pay.

Really? Well, I hope “most mass market consumers” will be happy with their $170 tablets that, clearly, won’t be total heaps of shit. (I know technology tends to drop in price over time, but $170 for a tablet? Really?)

The latest CEO berk: Netgear’s Patrick Lo. According to Smarthouse, he invited all of six journos to what appears to be a sad little rant about Apple and Microsoft.

In case you’re wondering, Lo:

• had no answers why Apple was more successful than Negear (and so he can’t really have thought about it all that much);
• said Apple’s ‘closed model’ only works because Apple “owns the market” for things like MP3 players;
• claimed Jobs versus Flash is all about ego;
• whined that “Steve Jobs doesn’t give me a minute,” to relay his concerns about Apple’s business practices. (Gosh, I wonder why.)

Still, the Smarthouse article reports that Lo’s criticism of Microsoft was rather more brief, saying “Microsoft is over—game over—from my point of view”. I’m sure Ballmer and co. will agree, with Microsoft’s tiny $6.66 billion Q1 profit versus Netgear’s most recently revealed quarter: $13.1 million. Still, I’m sure that was a blip and I look forward to Netgear’s February 8 announcement where it’s overtaken Microsoft.

As you may have heard, the Metropolitan police once again used a truly proportional response to deal with some tax protestors, hospitalising three with CS spray (Guardian) while they were protesting peacefully in Boots. Clearly, the staff were frightened for their lives, so much so that they subsequently gave the rampaging, highly violent protestors free treatment.

Still, it’s not only the Metropolitan police who covered themselves in glory sauce—the Boots spokesperson who provided a statement regarding the reasoning behind the company’s Swiss tax registration came up with an absolute gem:

In the longer term we believe it will better reflect the increasingly international nature of our wider group

Yes, Boots, that well-known international powerhouse that isn’t, say, a meandering British brand with a few outlets in other countries.

Not content with having dug a deep enough hole, the spokesperson continued:

If we had registered in Switzerland purely for tax reasons there are many other countries that we could have considered.

Well, that makes it OK then.

Smart move by Microsoft, saying it’s considering offering Office on the Mac App Store (All Things Digital). Priced right, it could be a massive success. But it also shows that one of the missing majors realises that the Mac App Store is going to be it for Mac software in the not too distant. It’ll be interesting to see how (if?) Adobe responds.