| Friday, April 29, 2011 |
05:06 - It's still cool to like them, right? ...Right?
http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/04/09/the-money-made-by-microsoft-apple-and-google-198
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It'd be great to see some updated versions of these graphs, in light of recent developments.
What might be interesting to me personally, though, is some kind of histogram breakdown of revenue and profitability by product line, to the extent that it's available. For all of each company's products. I'd really like to see how many Microsoft products have been hits and how many have been flops, versus Apple's bizarre ability to make just about anything an object of lust.
My suspicion is that Microsoft's most profitable software products come from things that nobody actually wants to buy anyway—Windows, Office, SharePoint, SQL Server, biz services—and all the ancillary stuff they sell, all the also-rans, serve mostly the purpose they only really achieved with the Xbox: earning style points and hipness cred. Whereas Apple makes its money almost solely on the basis of things people want to buy, just because it's cool.
It makes for a heady time in the sun; but hipness is fickle, whereas business builds up one hell of a head of steam.
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Brian Tiemann
