Apple Tops Microsoft in Third Quarter Revenue

[mKTank]

Apple sells mainly stunning physical products while Microsoft mainly sells licenses for bloatware and badly-made game consoles.

How soon until Microsoft can't match Apple's quarterly net profit, either? Maybe the one coming up? After all, MS can't release a new Office every quarter.

Facedesk.

Macs in general are Apple's biggest failing. Aside from, you know, the Apple TV.

Windows 7 isn't bloatware. Get with the times.

The 360 is a badly made game console? Oh Christ, you get an A on your trolling exam.


Basically, you're quite representative of most of this community: blind jerks who are still stuck in 1999 who still think Windows gets BSODs and crashes. Ignorant as all hell.

 

[Nanasaki]

Please come to an Apple forum and educate us all on MS Products.

I am pretty sure we can all say we have met idiots when it comes to the PC/Mac world.

I have no means against Apple. In fact, i have a Macbook and i am using iPod touch. But i am sick and tired for Apple fans constantly bashing Microsoft. In reality, Microsoft's product aren't all bad. I am just feel people who are blindly following some company just not too smart. So...

 

[ericinboston]

<<Remember, Apple sells to consumers.>>

Well... they DO yes. But they also have millions of business accounts.

I politely disagree...your statement is the biggest load-of-dung sentence I've read in years. Apple is lucky if they have a few thousand unique businesses that they sell (ummmmmm) their Macs to. No enterprise software. No enterprise hardware (ok maybe 35 Mac Servers a year somewhere in the world). No small business apps. I don't know who told you Apple has millions of business accounts...they clearly are mistaken. Millions?! Are there truly MILLIONS of businesses in the world that require computers? And let's not forget that MS/PC industry owns 90% (if not more) of X businesses...so in order for Apple to have MILLIONS, they would need 10% of X to equal millions. Doing the math, hence X would need to be at least 100 million businesses in the world. (90% of 100million = 90million for MS/PC and 10%=10 million for Apple). Apple has 10 million business accounts?...No way, Jose.

I agree Microsoft is better for designing custom software for grocery stores and government. Probably will be like this for a long time.

No. MS and the PC industry simply catered and helped the business industry. Apple on the other hand, as they always have for everything they do, has demanded 100% control by Apple. Businesses never buy into that concept. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars worth of IT infrastructure is not going to be left into the vendor's (Apple) hands to dictate how a company operates? Again, no way, Jose.

But in the long run, Mom & Dad and grandma will have Macs, instead of PC's like they do now.

That would be nice. Remember that 2010 is a lot different than 1995 and 1985. So much of what consumers "do" on a computer is web-based: email, online banking, shopping, chat, Facebook, research/Wikipedia/Google, news, tv/video watching, etc....thus the Operating System is irrelevant because everything is through a set of STANDARDS that a web browser (Firefox, IE, Chrome, Safari) conform to. Take away the OS layer and for MS it is a nightmare on crack. For Apple, well, it's the same nightmare but they're the ones that only sell the Mac OS AND the very limited hardware line so they should be doubly freaked out. A short few years from now it's not going to make a difference what OS/hardware Grandma or I use to do all of my online tasks...be it the iPhone or iPad or Mac or PC. It's online and it's standard. OS manufacturers/divisions (MS and Apple and Linux) lose. Period. What will ultimately convince me or grandma to choose "a computer" will be the 10% of stuff that the web does not offer such as audio/video production, digital photo manipulation, documents (MS Office), and lastly personal choice on style of the physical hardware as well as the ability to customize the experience (desktop colors/backgrounds/schemes/usability/etc.

God that is flustering. "I can buy a $500 HP laptop with Windows, then call my son when it doesn't work. Thanks Dad! uuggghh!

I'm sincerely being polite...please stop and don't be ignorant. PC vendors wouldn't own 90+% marketshare of both consumers and businesses for 20+ years if the stuff sucked. We've all had our problems with PCs as well as Macs...large or small...just like cars, homes, and lawn mowers. My personal experience is that my PCs since 1994 have had a few problems equally as much as my Mac Mini and previous iMacs and Mac...such as a random crash/bluescreen every few years. Nothing is perfect and luckily (believe it or not) computers are pretty good for auto-recovering from a crash. Lastly, for the 10% of the world owning a Mac that fails, have fun locating and contacting a FREE resource (neighbor, friend, peer, family member) that will help you out. The PC world owners have far more free choices (since 90% of the world is PC based) for those rare times something goes bump in the night.

And why are you blaming Windows/MS? HP is making the promise to you that the machine/experience will work/perform in a manner you can use. Display stop working?...call HP. PC won't start up?...call HP. Battery dead?...call HP. Very very very rarely is it truly a Windows problem such as incompatibility with software or hardware. In the case of software, call your software provider for help...they're the ones that wrote the program (do you expect Apple to field MS Office or Halo or Farmville questions?). In the case of hardware, call HP (since they sold you the machine and thus it should work 100% out of the box). If my Sony tv didn't work out of the box, I would call Sony...not my cable company.

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

Apple sells mainly stunning physical products while Microsoft mainly sells licenses for bloatware and badly-made game consoles.

You continue to demonstrate that you know very little about technology. Windows isn't bloated blame the manufactures who bundle the crap software. Exchange and Server2010 have no bloat and neither does SCCM.

 

[ericinboston]

What??

Dude they are already into games. My 8 year old son never plays with his PSP anymore. Discs and moving electronic parts will be a thing of the past.

When did I ever talk about moving parts or media distribution? All I said was Apple will never (succeed) in a gaming console market (such as PS3, Wii, etc). My reasoning is that gaming (in all shapes and forms) has never been a strong point or importance for Apple and more importantly, everyone on earth knows how much of a control freak Apple/Jobs is. Far more than the Sony's and Nintendos of the world...hence developers (as we have been seeing for years with the App Store) are getting annoyed at the whole Big Brother attitude (which again I repeat, has been the DNA of Apple forever).

Apple doesn't have to be into games. There are hundreds of game apps submitted to Apple almost daily now.

See my last sentence above...

I admit Mac's have always sucked for games. Probably because those programming geeks hate Apple in the first place. And it's cheaper to code for PC? Dunno, I don't want to get ahead of my self here.

It's not so much being cheaper to make an app for 1 system or another...it's all about the payoff...how many people are gonna buy your game? If 90% of the world has system X and 10% have system Y, which system are you going to code to to sell your $50 game? Yup...system X with 9x more sales for you than system Y. And we're not talking about 100 vs 9...we're talking millions and hundreds of millions of system X users. Business and Marketing 101. If you know that 90% of the people in your town are Catholic and 10% are Jewish, are you going to create, promote, and sell Christmas greeting cards or Hanukkah greeting cards? At least...from a capitalist point of view (us Americans), you're going to concentrate on the Christmas cards first.

 

[CFreymarc]

The real conundrum is why Ballmer hast had his fat, non-performing ass fired yet.

The Microsoft board of directors is a very bizarre set of bedfellows. Trying to map out the complementing and conflicting interests of all the portfolios is worthy of some of the best Securities PIs that are out there.

My take is that Ballmer is going to take his Platinum Parachute in the next six to twelve months after the results of the Microsoft Phone 7 launch are in. From that, we will see how well these founders honed the next generation to take the helm.

In a way it will be like IBM in 1971 when Thomas John Watson, Jr. retired.

 

[MSUSpartan]

MSFT doesn't have the same vision without Gates, too bad for MSFT he went off to try solving human and world issues.

Companies rise and fall, you'll see a company overtake Apple at some point too. Look at how the mighty Big 3 have fallen.

 

[mKTank]

Clearly the oh so intelligent community of MacRumors know more about managing a corporation, one worth billions and that is one of the most successful corporations of all time, that its current CEO.

You people are so full of yourselves I'm going to need a bunker just in case.

 

[CFreymarc]

The only people still spewing this non-sense about a MS vs. Apple war are clueless fanboys like LTD and BRLawyer. Good thing the rest of us know better. Even Steve himself said that Apple doesn't want to beat MS. Apple CAN'T beat MS. And it doesn't need to to be sucessful.

Totally agree. If anything Apple is a fashion company hiding itself as a technology company.

Personally and professionally, I do not consider people like Ballmer, Gates, Packard or Hewlett the peers of Steve Jobs. I consider Steve's peers fashion designers like Halston. Bill Blass, Tommy Hilfinger and -- of course! -- Giorgio Armani.

Those that really use Apple products well and professionally go for style first and functionality second. This is why Apple wieners are some of the most pathetic out there. Kind of like buying a top of the line Giorgio Armani suit and then complain about the typeface of the manufactures tag.

 

[ericinboston]

MSFT doesn't have the same vision without Gates, too bad for MSFT he went off to try solving human and world issues.

Yes...Bill made is 40+ Billion (can you imagine that amount of money?...think about it...if he drove down the highway with a car full of 40billion and 1million got sucked out the window he would still have 39billion 999 million bucks!!) and moved on after decades of success. He more than deserved it. But you are correct that without him over the past years MS has simply been far too slow at releasing quality products.

My guess is that MS will rehire Bill and like Apple rehiring Jobs, the company will turn around. What they will produce (since they are not computer-hardware creators) is beyond me. On one hand Apple does have a better outlook because they control the entire Apple computer hardware/software/integration portfolio but also have (now) a great consumer electronics division. Consumers really like the "one throat to choke" mentality as well as the "black box" mentality. Apple made it...Apple has to fix it. I really can't see MS having a consumer electronics division like Apple...not because MS stinks but because the ENTIRE PC/MS industry is completely opposite of Apple/Mac...PC land is all about openess and licensing and thousands of vendors playing nicely together...Apple's all about 100% control not only for what is created by Apple (hardware, OS, apps, content licensing (iTunes)), but what is "approved" to be sold on their products. This is both a plus and minus for Apple and my bet says a few years from now Apple will be sued for monopoly type activities (just like MS 10 years ago) as well as developers will simply leave to earn more money for their effort. One thing that Ballmer said is (and always has been) true: developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers!

 

[rhett7660]

I have no means against Apple. In fact, i have a Macbook and i am using iPod touch. But i am sick and tired for Apple fans constantly bashing Microsoft. In reality, Microsoft's product aren't all bad. I am just feel people who are blindly following some company just not too smart. So...

It goes both ways........Wait till you see the mix of Android fans who come here also... Good times!

 

[knightlie]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Rounding error.

 

[Žalgiris]

Microsoft wasn't a shining beacon of light before and it sure isn't now that Balmer is in charge. Juts look at the guy every major Apple products he saw as a failure and everytime he was proven wrong. If he can't see competition how can he run such company.

 

[ericinboston]

Microsoft wasn't a shining beacon of light before and it sure isn't now that Balmer is in charge.

Care to define "shining beacon of light?" How about that Windows has owned 90% of the OS market since about 1993. How about that 90% of consumers since 1993 own a PC instead of Mac? What about MS dominating the business sector with software like Windows Server, SQL Server, and MS Office? What about Gates being the richest guy in the world for decades? Has MS ever been on the deathbed like Apple was for a few years in the mid-90s?

I agree that Ballmer has no imagination. I agree that Bill had more innovation/vision than Ballmer. But Ballmer will likely be fired by mid 2011, Gates may come back (probably more for morale than anything else), and MS will continue to be the middle-guy in the PC vendor world...creating SOFTWARE...not hardware. Maybe MS will dip it's toes into non-computer hardware such as phones or tv gizmos like AppleTV...who knows. MS is far far far from dying....and MS is facing just as much competition from Android and Linux (in the business sector) and Sony Playstation as they are from Apple. Apple is one small thorn in MS's ankle.

You have to remember that MS and Apple create completely different products...and for various audiences (example: Apple has no business software offering unlike MS)

 

[Žalgiris]

You have to remember that MS and Apple create completely different products...and for various audiences (example: Apple has no business software offering unlike MS)

That's why Microsoft made Zune right. Every hardware project from Microsoft is a failure, so maybe they should stick to the software.

P.S. Apple does software too, as far as i know Mac OS X is software right? FCS and other Pro apps are software too right?

 

[macintoshtoffy]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8B117)

Quite telling. Apple's a fraction of MS' size, employs a smaller workforce, and has a smaller R&D budget. And look at what's happening. Pretty embarassing for Ballmer. But no surprise at all.

Wasn't Windows 7 supposed to kill the Mac? What happened there? Apple ended up selling *more* Macs, so much that they're now the third largest PC manufacturer.

The real conundrum is why Ballmer hast had his fat, non-performing ass fired yet.

Apple doesn't use the scatter-gun approach (sometimes known as 'spray and pray') - they mark out some niches in the market, they hone in on what is provided, get the R&D to focus like a laser on the target with the net result being a very efficient company with very little waste. Compare that to Microsoft who throw money left right and centre - how many of the things do you see being created in Microsoft's R&D are actually turning up in products? how of them are actually transferable from the laboratory to the real world?

As for Ballmer, the blame isn't solely on his shoulders since the problems existed well before he became CEO; they existed when Bill Gates CEO where he may have ideas but a complete scatterbrain when it comes to bringing discipline to a large organisation and getting it focused. The success Microsoft had under Bill Gates had less to do with him and more to do with the climate - even he admitted that he and Microsoft have been very luck, and no, he wasn't being modest.

 

[NickFalk]

Considering I am a business user and have NEVER used Powerpoint for personal purposes (not sure anyone does...), I have no use for transitions and/or fancy templates. This merely reinforces the fact that MS Office is for people who have real work to do and iWork is for people who print out PTA newsletters and bake sales analysis. I suppose MS could "prettify" it but why? I guarantee you few people even use crap like glowing text and spiral transitions in their presentations unless they're still in school.

While I agree Office have a lot more power-user features the above makes very little sense.

Keynote by design, and well thought out templates lends itself to better designed presentations. This will help you make more efficient presentations that actually reach the audience. SeriousWork != boring && badLooking.

 

[Dooger]

I have no means against Apple. In fact, i have a Macbook and i am using iPod touch. But i am sick and tired for Apple fans constantly bashing Microsoft. In reality, Microsoft's product aren't all bad. I am just feel people who are blindly following some company just not too smart. So...

+1

Totally agree. If anything Apple is a fashion company hiding itself as a technology company.

Personally and professionally, I do not consider people like Ballmer, Gates, Packard or Hewlett the peers of Steve Jobs. I consider Steve's peers fashion designers like Halston. Bill Blass, Tommy Hilfinger and -- of course! -- Giorgio Armani.

Those that really use Apple products well and professionally go for style first and functionality second. This is why Apple wieners are some of the most pathetic out there. Kind of like buying a top of the line Giorgio Armani suit and then complain about the typeface of the manufactures tag.

This made me chuckle. Nice work dude.

 

[acidfast7]

While I agree Office have a lot more power-user features the above makes very little sense.

Keynote by design, and well thought out templates lends itself to better designed presentations. This will help you make more efficient presentations that actually reach the audience. SeriousWork != boring && badLooking.

Anyone who uses a template for a PPT-style presentation should be shot.

 

[iCeltic]

Ballmer, you are the man!!!!!

Why every one want Ballmer fired, longer he stay, faster Microsoft going down, and happier I will be, and I guess every Apple fan will be too.

So let us go with Ballmer.

 

[Mike225]

Why every one want Ballmer fired, longer he stay, faster Microsoft going down, and happier I will be, and I guess every Apple fan will be too.

So let us go with Ballmer.

Thankfully not every "Apple fan" wants Microsoft to go under.

I think the world would turn to panic if Microsoft went under.

 

[NickFalk]

Anyone who uses a template for a PPT-style presentation should be shot.

Yeah! MS one great crime against humanity: Including non-designer designed templates with their office software.

 

[acidfast7]

Yeah! MS one great crime against humanity: Including non-designer designed templates with their office software.

We actively discourage template usage because it's looks "gimmicky." Black text, while background is perfect for a scientific talk. Everything else is a distraction.

 

[gorjan]

You use Word for Serious Scientific Work?

\LaTeX, of course...

Hehe, I know, a friend of mine says so too. But LaTeX is more for math and physics. I write medical papers, so Word is enough.

If you are writing a study and you are ready top publish it, the scientific work is most likely finished (through specialized statistical programs) and all you need to do is publish your results and findings. If a study is big enough, most likely a different program will be used to lay it out and publish it. Most of the time, different contributors will use Word for simple word processing to send their material to be published. You will never distribute a study in Word (At least I have not seen that from the medical community). Abstracts and Studies these days are dist in PDF and other forms so you can protect your content.

Yes, we're working on a study and the statistics are done in SPSS PASW. So what? Then you use Word to write the paper and include the results from SPSS before you send it to publishing. You have to get your study into a PDF from some sort of editor, and Word does the job. Also, we don't distribute the paper/content, the journal does that, and yes they distribute it in PDF. I'm actually not sure if we submit the paper in PDF or DOC, as I'm not the lead author and she take care of the submission.

As the saying goes, A bad workman always blames his tools!

Yeah sure, go ahead and manage all the references for a 20 page paper for hand and tell me how much time you waste. I use a combo of Papers + Endnote + Word, and I get my referencing done in no time, if I were to do it by hand in Pages it would take hours. And you're just being childish. I don't blame the tools, Pages is a fine piece of software for home use and probably most uses in the office. But for work requiring references, it's garbage out of the box.

And spelling and grammar checking is better in Word, and as english is not my first language I appreciate this while writing my papers.

 

[bobob]

Great… now there will be rumors of Apple buying Microsoft.

Being a longtime Apple supporter that would be amazing an amazing turn of events to witness in my lifetime.

(At the very least I'd like to see Apple save Microsoft with a $150 million investment when they get in a pinch. )