That's an accurate assessment, except I'd also say that the management is also structured more efficiently. Jobs doesn't believe in more then 100 people on a team.
I understand at MS there are even teams working at cross-purposes. That's more common when a company is throwing money and people at a project. It gets so big it becomes unmanageable and unfocused.
SirOmega said:Hmmm.. Microsoft has 86,000 employees. Apple has 46,600. Yet (as of the last quarter) they're roughly equal in revenue for the last 12 months (62-65M). So Apple employees are 50% more efficient than their MSFT counterpart in terms of generating revenue.
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I wonder how many of the 46,600 employees are developers, I would imagine a large majority work in Apple retail.
Think! Apple charges you $100 for an app. That's "Income." They keep $30, that's "profit." So the margin was 30%. Of course they have overhead on running the app store and paying the goofballs that approve apps, so after that is removed from the profit, the net margin will be under 30% somewhere.
paulyras said:Of course, the more apps on the iOS and Mac App Stores, the more the gross margins will compress (at least down towards 30%). Even before factoring bandwidth and servers (really the only overhead), the gross margins by definition can't be more than 30%, as they're passing 70% of revenue on to the developers.
That said, given the minimal cost of sales, etc..., I'm sure they'll take as much of those margins as they can possibly get day, night, and weekends.