Displaying items by tag: Competition

Taiwan Trade Commission fined the company Apple with a fine in the amount of $667,000 because of their impact on the price of iPhone products and tariffs that go along with them in the Taiwanese telecommunications operators. Also, they noted that if this practice continues Apple will be punished with a much higher fine in the amount of $1,670,000.

Back when Apple first started their legal campaign against Samsung they (Apple) were also beginning to break away from Samsung. This was understandable as there were and still are rumors (unconfirmed) that the whole legal argument started over the pricing of parts. The rumors claimed that Apple approached Samsung looking for preferential pricing and threatened to seek legal remedies if Samsung did not go along. Now we know that at least part of this it true. Apple did go to Samsung about pricing and also brought up their concerns about Samsung’s push into the smartphone market. If the rest is true no one but Apple and Samsung know for certain, but Apple did file a big suit against Samsung and have also been gradually pulling away from their Samsung as a primary supply partner ever since.

Some of you might remember the days of the “P” rating CPUs. It was an interesting time when you never really knew what you were actually getting in terms of clock speed. Instead you were able to get a CPU named something like P333 or P500. This was an attempt by some manufacturers to show their “P”erformance rating in relation to Intel’s Pentium. Cyrix, AMD, and a couple of others used this to sell CPUs. Unfortunately everyone knew that the P did not really stand for performance it really meant Pentium equivalency. A Cyrix P667 was supposed to perform as well as an Intel Pentium 667 (at least on paper). Sadly this just confused the market more and we all had the fun of trying to figure out what our CPUs were really doing. Now we might be seeing the trend return, but perhaps in reverse as AMD has announced the Centurion CPU.

LG Display announced operating results for the first three months of the year and they are worse than in the previous quarter.

As more and more quarterly reports pour in, AMD decided to join with their own, which is not as fantastic as some other have, but it's better than what we have expected from AMD, the eternal loser. Thus, the total loss of the first quarter of this year is $143 million, which is better than the loss in the final quarter of last year ($473 million) and in the same quarter last year, when they amounted to even $590 million.

Amazon's new device, the Kindle Paperwhite will soon be shipping out from their warehouses and one of their biggest rivals Barnes & Noble won’t just sit around and wait to see what will happen. So far B&N has been at the top of the illuminated e-reader market and now Amazon wants their share of it too. The step B&N decided to take is to cut the price of their NOOK SimpleTouch with GlowLight device from $139 to $119, the same price that Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite will be selling. Even though it's pretty obvious that this is a reflex reaction to the Paperwhite launch, people at B&N say it has nothing to do with it.

There could be good news for gamers as EA (formerly known as Electronic Arts) has agreed to a settlement in the Anti-Trust case over their exclusive deal with the NFL, NCAA, and AFL. Although all of the details are not known what we do know is that EA is agreeing to end their exclusive deal with the AFL and allow their agreement with the NCAA to expire in 2014. On top of these EA will pay $27 Million in compensation to consumers that bought any of these titles and will not seek another exclusive deal for five years. What is missing here is any mention of their exclusive deal with the NFL. Why this critical piece of the puzzle is being left out we are not sure.

Apple is in an interesting position right now and it is one that we are not sure will work out to their benefit. Although Apple is following other smart phone manufacturers and catching up to where they were 2 years ago they are also working very hard to patent items that should NEVER be allowed. Because of this we have a feeling that Apple will be pushing their legal battle on the smartphone and tablet front even harder than before. The problem is that they will only come out looking bad in the end especially overseas where some of the courts are starting to wake up to Apple’s pattern of broad “attack” patents meant for use against competitors.

A second Linux Distro has joined the Microsoft Secure Booth party. You see Microsoft has come up with what they are calling the UEFI Secure Boot. UEFI Secure boot is somewhat controversial in that once set up it will only allow signed versions of an OS to be installed. This means that if a computer is shipped from an OEM with Windows 8 and UEFI Secure Boot on you could not install a generic version of Linux or indeed any other OS including Windows 7 etc. This would effectively lock someone into using Windows 8 only on these devices. This block would include even downgrading your new system to Windows 7.

We wondered when this would start happening, but Microsoft’s decision to compete against their own partners has had its first casualty. It seems that after the Surface was announced last night LG has decided to stop working on new tablets for the foreseeable future. Is this decision in response to having to compete with Microsoft or a decision that is based on LG’s poor sales in the market?