MS vs. Apple in the stock market:
Extrapolating from Apple’s form in the last quarter they are on a pace to do a gross of about $16 billion this year. Microsoft, which own 96% of the desktop market or so, made $36.8 billion last year.
So Apple is grossing almost 1/2 as much as Microsoft with a much smaller percentage of the desktop market. Is that perhaps due to selling hardware rather than software? There are associated costs to this of course which make selling software much more desirable but it seems that Apple has been growing dramatically in the last couple of years in total sales volume.
And of course, software products were also on the MacWorld agenda: iLife 05 and Pages, the second piece of the office software puzzle. I have to wonder why they’re not working with OpenOffice, but at the same time, it opens a second front. Open Source OS users and Windows users alike can use OpenOffice or KOffice or even individual apps (AbiWord and gnumeric) while Mac users are offered Pages and Keynote (where is the Excel replacement?). I doubt it will make much of a dent in MSFT’s revenue stream, but it may be more than a mere distraction.
Now playing: She Said by Brie Larson from the album “iTunes New Music Sampler (Universal Motown Edition)”