Apple spends $2 billion a year on R&D to generate $130 billion revenue.
Microsoft spends $9 billion a year on R&D to generate $70 billion revenue.
Everything Apple tries in the last decade has turned into a monster hit(iPod, iPhone, iMacs, iPad). Microsoft has no NEW products in the last decade that are monster hits. Only the legacy monopolies(Windows, Office, Visual Studio) continue raking in the monster profits. Everything else(Bing, XBox, Zune, Windows Phone, Courier, etc..) gets funded from those legacy profits.
Bottom line - Apple knows how to nip bad designs in the bud EARLY to prevent huge operating expenses. By the time they get to market with a product, it's guaranteed HUGE success. Microsoft just tries a bunch of bad ideas and hopes 1 sticks to the all(XBox 360 with XBL).
Well, you're certainly wrong about the Xbox business branch - it's a success and it's also profitable.
I also doubt that the Mac is a "monster hit". The Mac unit is profitable, but at less than 5 percent global market share Macs are hardly what I would call a monster hit. Compared to PCs running Windows, they are still insignificant.
Since you are the one who started comparing oranges with apples: I think Microsoft sold as many Xbox units as Apple sold Macs. Yet, you're saying that the Xbox is a subsidized flop and the Mac is a monster hit. The number of sold devices don't support your statement.
And Macs still have not entered the corporate world.
You also like to talk about the flops that Microsoft produced. How about Apple's flops? The AppleTV cannot hold a candle to Microsoft's Xbox business and we all know how much the Xserve sucked and how inappropriate OS X is as a server operating system -- not even Apple uses OS X and Xserves in its own data centers, they buy all data center hard- and software from Oracle.
Windows Server, on the other side, is a major backbone of businesses around the globe.
Microsoft is doing a lot more than just Windows, Office and Visual Studio. You just don't see most of their products at your local electronics store because like IBM and Oracle, they sell ENTERPRISE products, VERY successful enterprise products, and those are not limited to SQL Server, Exchange Server or Sharepoint Portal. They also successfully sell consulting services around their backoffice products.
Apple only became successful when they entered the gadgets market and began selling mp3 players and phones. And we haven't seen ANY new product families from Apple since then either. This could easily be a bubble that bursts when people get bored by their iDevices and move on to the next fashionable product du jour.
Once, the phone market was brutally dominated by Nokia. Look how quickly that changed. So what makes you guys think that Apple's success is going to last? After the all, the company was already on life support before the iPod came to their rescue. And who knows? Maybe the forthcoming generation of Windows phones will come to Nokia's rescue and bring them back to their former glory and let people forget about the iPhone.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has always been a steady and reliable success. They might be boring and not cool, but you shouldn't forget that they are playing a different sport than Apple -- they are an ENTERPRISE and OEM player, Apple on the other hand sells fashionable lifestyle electronics. You're basically comparing a perfume store with a bank.
But unlike Apple, Microsoft is at least willing to take risks and spends money on R&D instead of putting it all in the piggy bank.
Both companies have one thing in common, though: Their visionary founding fathers are no longer around.
Microsoft lost its bite and turned into another IBM when Bill Gates handed the business over to Steve Ballmer. And now Apple is also no longer run by a product visionary but by an accountant - and Tim Cook very much appears to be an accountant who is afraid of taking risks and shaking the boat. You don't need much imagination to predict the future of that company now that the "product pipeline" left behind by Steve Jobs is running dry.
Both corporations have too much money to fail (quickly), but you also cannot expect the next big thing from either one of them.
Google is also a large corporation deeply entrenched in a highly profitable market niche. But when I see Project Glass and the Driverless Car, at least I see truly innovative and visionary products.
But still, the next big thing will probably come from some small company that's on nobody's radar yet. Maybe it won't even be a computer product. Gene technology is big in Asia because they don't have any legal constraints there. Well, we'll see what the future brings.
