What leads to a more equitable pay distribution is having apps with a more equitable quality distribution.

I'm not shocked that most of these apps never make a dime. Nor should they - they are terrible.

And Adobe gets there by maintaining an effective monopoly over the entire creative industry. See: their forced migration to their subscription versions of Creative Suite for all volume license customers in June.

Do you really think that enterprise businesses want "cloud" subscription versions ticking away at operational expense, rather than the perpetual license versions they used to be able to spend capital expense dollars on?

Adobe finally realized that they have the balls of the world's media and advertising business in a bench vise, and that they really like money.

Let me see if I can follow the bouncing ball on this one.

1. Some guy writes an app that he had an idea for in his spare time, and it sells well.
2. He then quits his day job and hires a bunch of people, taking on VC and private funding based on a business plan of "I had one good idea, so clearly I'm going to have unlimited good ideas, and there will never be any competition in any idea that I have"
3. When his business plan proves to not be accurate or sustainable, he ends up in financial difficulty.

And this is the fault of Apple / Google ? If anything, it's the fault of the VC guys for giving out money to people that have done no planning whatsoever.

It is considered "Fair Use" as defined in Sony v Universal (the Betamax decision). Because it's private use, and is only considered "place shifting", there is no copyright infringement to be found unless you redistribute the shifted media.

They don't even need better lawyers. They need one paralegal that can search American Law Review, where this was already decided in 1999 in the case of RIAA v Diamond Multimedia - the landmark case that makes all portable MP3 players legal under the "space shifting" provision of the Audio Home Recording Act.

There's a reason why the RIAA hasn't tried this shit since that decision - they already failed in circuit court, and on appeal. Does anyone really think they didn't want a piece of the iPod market?

Not time shifting, but space shifting; which was upheld by the Ninth Circuit in RIAA v Diamond Multimedia like 15 years ago.

They'll have no problem knocking this down whatsoever.

Then your bank is fucking you big time. I locked a 3.3% 15-year earlier this month.

Or, pricing the same system from Lenovo (or as close as you can get - they use Nvidia Quadro rather than AMD FirePro, and you have to go with a SATA SSD rather than PCI-E that performs >30% better) is $4200, in a much bigger and louder package.

I can't speak to your "bumped up specs to be a useful animation/artist box", but it seems that every single one that Apple has made since December has been happily sold to professionals that care only about getting their work done as quickly and accurately as possible, so Apple must be doing something right.

Which, coincidentally, is the same price you would pay for an "ideal server" from any other OEM.

Or, here's another look.

You are a massive semiconductor manufacturer, as well as a manufacturer of smartphone handsets. You've grown your phone business to being #1 in a market segment (Android) and you're one of the few making a profit, and people are actually buying in on your marketing. You've managed to do something that very few other companies ever get done, especially in a rapidly shifting tech marketplace.

But you are completely reliant on another company for your operating system, and they don't take their marching orders from you because they need to maintain relationships with your competitors.

We've seen this before (PC hardware), and we've seen what happens (Microsoft). Samsung is making a play to keep some leverage on Google - you fuck around with us, and we walk away taking half your market with us. The money spent on Tizen is simply for leverage on Google, to make sure that Google doesn't jerk their chain too much.

I'd like to temper the last bit of your post with the following addendum:

It's not surprising that Beats Audio is getting sued for this all of a sudden, now that they are about to have some very deep pockets for a potential settlement.

Oh, and Beats has had noise canceling tech shipping for at least a year, so this seems very much like Bose waiting until they could extract a nice cash settlement rather than actually working to protect a competitive technical advantage.

Yeah, because Apple has commented on this somewhere?

You do realize that Apple doesn't even own Beats Audio yet, right? And that this legal action, in no way resembles Bose making an opportunistic money grab now that it looks like Beats will be gaining some very deep pockets in the next few weeks, right?

Why didn't they sue months / years ago when Beats first put noise canceling products on the market?

It depends on the features being added. In particular, the feature being added for Windows 8 is that they are leveraging EFI booting in a way that isn't completely fucked up, and they've jettisoned a heap of code for backwards compatibility with hardware nobody uses any more.

Net effect: much more stable and efficient software.

Yeah, because nobody would ever gripe at Apple about version n+1 not being supported on their precious 3 year old phone.

Oh wait, everyone gripes about that when they have done that in the past.