I don’t know if these are out yet in the UK, but there was a recent report in the US of new Dell IPS models becoming available. If not it might be worth waiting for UK pricing on these:

In my view, not really in itself.

I think it would be much more damaging to the app development pipeline if a wider competition probe leads to the release of more comprehensive data on the financial returns so generated.

The web and offline media have plenty of get quick rich quick stories about app developers striking gold literally overnight. However, although I’m sure that is a possibility Apple’s marketing people are in no rush to dispel, the small number of big hits undoubtedly massively skew average app revenues.

Instead it seems to me obvious that median revenues are much, much smaller, likely resulting in a fair probability that writing an app will cost developers money. If that were to be widely publicised and understood, I believe it would be much more harmful to Apple.

As I understand it yes.

Well that certainly does sound impressive on cursory inspection, but a closer look reveals the hallmark of lawyers’ weasel-words: “Apple’s Open Source license”? Logically that’s a contradiction in terms.

Here’s the Open Software Initiative’s definition of Open Source software: http://opensource.org/docs/osd . See for yourself how many principles you believe Apple’ licensing policy violates—I make it 5/10.

I have already said I believe a key motivation is control-freakery but the economic argument is by no means trivial.

It is quite simply absurd to argue that the financial benefits to Apple of their anti-competitive conduct in the market for software development are small in relation to their overall revenues, and should therefore be ignored. What counts for the purpose of anti-monopoly regulation is the impact of the financial disadvantages suffered directly by their end market, in this instance software developers.

And my prior point related to allowing developers to use appropriate high-level languages is most certainly linked. By unnecessarily forcing developers to spend significant additional time coding apps, Apple are depriving them of the opportunity cost of their time. And time is money.

One other thing is worth mentioning here; Apple charges developers a flat rate royalty of 30% of revenues from app sales. That is assuming they generate something like $250 in revenue - which is by no means a foregone conclusion given the insignificant sales of the vast majority - otherwise the royalty rate is 100%.

At the same time Apple derives significant related revenues from the multitude of apps, since it is a key marketing factor driving hardware sales. And as their pricing strategy shows, Apple is at heart a hardware company. Even so, Apple’s royalty rate is astronomical, considering they award themselves exclusive distribution rights; in effect they want to have their cake and eat it.

By comparison I did some advisory work in the video gaming industry quite some time again, before the Xbox was but a gleam in Bill Gates’ eye and the Sony Playstation was the only real game in town. At that time Sony’s royalties were in the order of 10% of total revenues on externally developed titles. And that was with Sony’s business explicitly based on a model driven by software, that provided a cross-subsidy on loss leading hardware sales.

I don’t want to develop this argument further than to say in my view Apple’s overall actions are akin to price gouging. That is in the economic sense where a monopoly position can lead to the unreasonable exploitation of its end market. Under US antitrust rules this has a somewhat different meaning and the impact of the royalty position specifically is not typically actionable. However, it is a different matter under EU law, and I believe Apple’s recent flagrant anti-competitive actions will come back to haunt them if a wider competition probe gains momentum; hubris has a habit of doing that.

It appears to be a new model wih 14.2 mpix and 1080 video vs. 14.6 mpix and 720 video for the NX10 .

And what is interesting is that it was apparently listed in the dslr section of Samsung's website, as highlighted above.

That’s what the app approval process is supposedly there for.

First of all let us be clear that key and substantial parts of Apple’s software operating system architecture are in fact spawned from Unix and its derivatives. As such they have got a cheek asserting draconian software licensing policies given they have in effect - if not purloined - certainly appropriated huge chunks of open source software, that *must* be licensed accordingly.

However, gross hypocrisy is in itself not actionable under anti-monopoly regulation; what needs to be shown is that a company’s actions are harming the effective operation of its end market, in this case for software development.

I believe it is self evident that software developers should have the right to use the best tools for the job, provided they don’t have negative knock-on effects; as I have already said I strongly believe the blanket performance problem asserted by Apple is utterly bogus, but that is something that can easily be verified by independent third parties as part of a formal investigation.

Further, you may not appreciate the huge difference between programming an app for which the revenue is likely to me very small in what is basically the C language as required by the Apple sdk, compared to a high level language like Actionscript that is tailored to controlling a graphical interface. There are quite simply several orders of magnitude difference in complexity, perhaps something along the lines of 1 line of Actionscript code required for every 100 lines of C.

I’d be interested to hear whether an actual software developer like MattMattic hypothetically would prefer to write an iPhone app/game in C or Actionscript. Even if he has never written a line of the latter, I’d wager he would much prefer to learn it from scratch and use Actionscript rather than C or C++ ,which is quite simply a pain in the proverbial for something like a game which is by far the largest app category.

Separately, it must be remembered that Apple have a direct financial interest in maintaining the iPhone development environment as a closed shop. The recurrent cost of the official sdk is around $200/per annum, whereas I believe the Adobe cross-compiler is intended to be bundled with CS5, etc, which basically means it is a negligible one-time cost.

Clearly competition is good for the software development market on a number of different levels.

Well that’s self-evident, but for my sins in a past life I have more than a casual acquaintance with competition authorities on both sides of the Atlantic gaining clearance for mergers and acquisitions.

As I said, in my view this case is clear cut.

Given that Mac OS X is a Unix flavour which is based on a compiled language C, I am not surprised that this is an argument that even Apple have not tried to slip in.

As far as I am concerned this is about control-freakery, pure and simple.

And the reason that the competition authorities can get their teeth into this particular instance, is that Apple have 100% of the market for iPhone software development tools.

With respect you don’t seem to understand the basic issue that global anti-monopoly regulators are currently in the process of investigating.

Flash is an engine for manipulating graphics, text, and so on.

The way you program Flash is via a high level language called Actionscript. Flash may be insecure on Mac OS X, but the basic Actionscript language is not.

What Adobe have developed is something known as a cross-compiler, that can take Actionscript code and compile it for iPhone OS. As such this in effect substitutes native iPhone OS API calls for Flash API calls.

It has nothing to do with the Flash engine whatsoever.

It also has nothing whatsoever to do with guaranteeing some sort of nebulous level of customer satisfaction. If that were a genuine issue Apple could merely reject substandard apps cross-compiled from Actionscript code; undoubtedly some will work much better than others due to the relative skill of programmers. However, that will always be a factor, including for those apps developed using Apple’s native software development kit.

This is simply a transparent and crude attempt to eliminate competition in software development tools, totally lacking any mitigating circumstances. And that is why Apple are on a hiding to nothing with the competition authorities.

This is indeed grounds for optimism, but the snippet you quoted is misleading since it leaves out the discussion in the first paragraph on Pentax regarding the medical equipment side. See report for Q4 2010.

It follows that the discussion of profitability relates to the combined medical equipment/camera operations and as such it can not be inferred that the camera operations were profitable.

This is admittedly somewhat odd since the Hoya financial reports usually provide some mention of camera segment profitability, despite overall being highly economical with actual segment operating data.

One other thing is interesting; the combined Pentax operations have slashed headcount by around 20% compared to the same quarter last year. Since no mention has been made of restructuring in the Medical Equipment business the brunt of this organisational butchery has undoubtedly befallen the camera operations.

Some time ago I mentioned a strategy for Pentax as a packager and integrator of third party technology. However, for this to be viable what is required is something high priced advisors refer to as a reconfiguration of the value-added chain. This means you can’t just slash the organisation indiscriminately, but you also need to invest intelligently in appropriate areas such as software design, marketing, industrial design.

However, there is a school of thought in management consulting land that says to fix a broken organisation you first need to pare everything right back to the bone to eliminate a culture of failure; that’s very risky operationally. . .