The Money Made by Microsoft, Apple and Google, 1985 until Today

As we know the top industry rivals and leaders are Microsoft , Apple and Google. And always they trying to beat each-other but the war is not enough. These tech companies seem to come up over and over again. They’ve become the trinity of tech, at least as far as most IT consumers are concerned. Apple and Microsoft are veterans, having started their operations in the 1970s and gone public in the 1980s. In IT, that’s a very long time ago. Just think about it, these two companies were part of the birth of personal computing. We thought it would be interesting to see how their fortunes (as in “business success”) have changed through the years, and how Google, a much later arrival, compares.

We didn’t look at stock prices or anything that has a measure of speculation to it. No, we looked at cold, hard numbers: Revenue and Profit.

Yearly Revenue and Profit Over Time:

To get a feel for the momentum of history we collected numbers as far back as we could. The charts we’ve made for you go all the way back into the 1980s.

First let’s look at revenue, how much money these three companies have been pulling in through the years.

When you look at these charts, keep in mind that these numbers are all per year, not accumulated over time.

Now here’s an interesting observation: In the 1980s, Apple was a much bigger player than Microsoft in terms of revenue. Microsoft’s revenue didn’t pass Apple’s until the mid 1990s. However, look at how fast Apple’s revenue has been growing lately…

Then of course you have Google’s late but big-impact arrival (seen from its IPO in 2004). Google is a success that’s been pretty hard to miss, and here you can see the effect of that.

And then there’s the elephant in the room (almost literally). These charts show how Microsoft still towers over both Apple and Google when it comes to revenue and profit. Perhaps not so strange when you consider how big they are:

• Microsoft: 93,000 employees
• Apple: 36,800 employees
• Google: 19,835 employees

How much of the revenue is profit?

Another interesting thing to look at, and that is partly revealed by the revenue/profit graphs we’ve shown, is how much of the revenue becomes profit. Here are the numbers for 2009:

• Microsoft: 27.7%
• Apple: 17.8%
• Google: 27.6%

Google and Microsoft are really close here, at just under 28%. Apple with its 17.8% lags behind, but it’s getting better. Go back just five years (to 2004) and Apple’s profit was just 5.2% of its revenue.

Microsoft is quite impressive in that through all the years it’s never gone below 20%. Ok, one exception: in 1985, Microsoft’s profit was “only” 18.8% of the revenue. On the other hand, it’s also gone as high as 40.4% (in 2000).
These days we are so used of thinking of Apple as the David to Microsoft’s Goliath, so it’s interesting to look back at a time when the situation was actually the opposite. Microsoft was a much smaller company than Apple back in the 1980s, and it wasn’t really until after its success with Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 that the company really (really) started to approach its current Goliath status.
And consider this: Both Apple and Google have been growing their revenues and profits at a much faster rate than Microsoft the last few years. Is that a sign of things to come? Will Apple once more be a bigger company than Microsoft at some point in the future? Will Google? Stranger things have happened.

Read full Article

Plz Do not Hesitate to Comments on Article. You can share if you know more about it