Links for Wednesday March 9^th, 2011

• John Gruber on Apple’s 30% cut: To the victor goes the pricing power: Joshua Benton:

  "With all the great innovation that’s gone on in the news space, there are still no for-profit newsrooms with the scale and heft and journalistic weaponry of the nation’s biggest newspapers. They’re still important, and they’ve been looking to the app economy as a big part of their efforts to figure out a place in the digital economy. It would have been nice if Apple might have cut them some slack. Yeah, that’s not Steve Jobs’ problem — I get that. Apple’s earned their pricing power by being innovative and smart. But it still would have been nice."

  I'll go even further and say that it makes good business sense for Apple to court major publishers now, so that they can get as much content as possible. They can always jack up the rates later, after the iPad's lead is unassailable. (via Daring Fireball)

• Apotheker Seeks to Save HP’s ‘Lost Soul’ With Software Growth: Nice look at challenges facing Leo Apotheker at HP.

• Microsoft's lack of a tablet strategy will lose it $1bn in profits this year: The fact that Microsoft still doesn't have a credible iPad competitor (and by all accounts, won't have one this year) boggles the mind. And if this report is to be believed, Microsoft could start feeling the "iPad effect" on their bottom line this year. (via The Orange View)

• Apple Shifting A5 Production From Samsung to TSMC?: If this is true, it's interesting that Apple is trying to move away from Samsung as a supplier.