Folks, What is happening? Where is the Carriage, is it about Midnight and Cinderella will have a pumpkin? Those that have been long time Mac folks should enjoy this.
John Apple's iPhone Business is Now Larger Than All of Microsoft + Comment now This won’t be a surprise to anyone who has been following the numbers butApple‘s iPhone business alone is now larger than all of Microsoft. I’ll confess that while I was aware of the numbers I obviously wasn’t paying attention as this point hadn’t occurred to me. Parislemon makes it plain: Apple’s iPhone business alone is larger than all of Microsoft’s businesses combined. And as he goes on to point out, if you took the iPhone business out of Apple then what remains is still larger than all of Microsoft combined. Now yes, this is a result of the stunning expansion of sales in this past year or two, even you need the rise in that last quarter’s sales to make the sums fully work. But to someone like me who started paying attention to the computer industry around 1988, 89, this is a gross affront to the established worldview. Apple’s the plucky little upstart with a niche business and Microsoft is the globally encompassing near monopolist of the desktop. Not that either of those were entirely and wholly true at any point but that has been, until just these last few years of iPods, iPhones and iPads, the general background to any story comparing the two firms. So the world has changed since my youth then: possibly not the most perceptive observation anyone has ever made I agree. One more thing: just to show that it’s not revenue that we are comparing here and thus it being some trick of the product mix which just makes Apple seem larger, the company also makes about twice the profits of Microsoft: in the last quarter, some $13 billion against $6.6 billion. Back in the very early days of personal computing it was possible to think that this might come true: that Apple, making both hardware and operating systems would beat the highly fragmented world of the IBM compatible PC. Then for about 25, 30 years it wasn’t, in fact it was near inconceivable that Apple would ever in any way “beat” the Beast of Redmond and yet now they are. But as I’ve remarked before, they’ve not done it by replacing Windows or Office, the things that tie the PC to Microsoft. They’ve done an end run around the end and edge of the whole PC technology. Which is also as I’ve said before. Monopolies tend to fall not when they are beaten in their own market but when their market becomes only a subset of a wider one, when advancing technology makes the monopolist’s position almost irrelevant.
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