I think Canon can sit quite smug until Nikon can demonstrate a significant profit from their strategy. You can give away anything, trying to make a profit as you win back market share is harder - especially when your competition has economies of scale in R&D and production.
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That's going to be very hard to figure out from the outside though.
But if anything it would seem that the economies of scale are on Nikon side, right? The figures I have read show that they are producing a lot more D3 than Canon produced 1ds2 + 1ds3 combined.
D700 can only expand that further, right?
If you are hinting at economies of scale in R&D between Canon camera division and other divisions, well that is also very hard to assess from the outside. They do probably indeed manage to commonalize some basic process and sensor design technology research between their still and video camera divisions, but my guess is that there is still a very significant part of the work that only pertains to the still sensors.
Besides, R&D is only a part of the work, the validation is also very heavy and that has to be mostly camera parts/camera assembly specific.
My contention is that Canon doesn't probably even know themselves exactly how much they save compared to how much they would have spent with totally separate divisions. So I don't know to what extend their integration will help them figuring out whether they should follow Nikon or not...
But in the end this is mostly non relevant for end users as long as Nikon stays in business and makes enough money to keep investing in R&D, which appears to be vert much the case today.
My view is that Nikon's approach is the right one because it gives access to many photographers to the cutting edge technology available at a given point of time. This is why I wrote above that Canon using the 1ds3 sensor in the successor of the 5D would be great for Canon users (unless I am over-estimating the quality of that sensor of course).
Cheers,
Bernard
