Windows 7 - How Microsoft (and 9 others) make their billions

JMH · 08-19-2010

Quote:

It has become a bit of a cliché: really innovative technology comes from garage-level startups. Once a company gets too large, it focuses its energy on keeping its existing customers happy, and loses its edge. But, for the most part, the technology we rely on for getting things done—providing the hardware and networking infrastructure, for example—comes from mature, profitable companies. So, we thought it might be interesting to take a step back and look at what tech companies are among the most successful at marketing products and services that are widely put to use.

Of course, any measure of "success" is inviting argument. Should it be profits, units sold, recent growth? We settled on two measures. The first is the market capitalization, which provides some sense of how the financial community views both a company's current fiscal strength and its potential for future growth. To provide some sense of how much of that is growth potential, we chose the price-to-earnings ratio as our other measure—the higher the number, the more the company's perceived growth potential factors into its market cap.

Defining tech

For starters, a couple of thoughts on companies we've chosen to leave out. One category that is extremely high-tech is the pharmaceutical industry. Either through in-house work or acquisitions, every major pharmaceutical company is now a biotech powerhouse, and relies on some really cutting edge approaches to generating products. Pharma companies are also huge. J&J, Roche, Pfizer, and Novartis are all within the top 30 (3 others are in the top 50), and would have made it onto our list, displacing more traditional tech companies.

Similarly, we're excluding telecommunications providers, even though some of them are equally huge. (China Mobile sits right behind Apple, AT&T is ahead of Google, and Telefonica and Vodafone are in the top-50). They both integrate lots of high-tech products and enable the latest and greatest tech toys, but progress here has been pretty evolutionary of late, and it's hard to escape the sense that they're simply offering pipes for others to send innovation through.

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Being a behemoth: how Microsoft (and 9 others) make their billions

BomberAF · 08-20-2010

MS also buy smaller companies and incorporate their inovations into Windows and Office.

neo101 · 08-21-2010

Correct - majority of their software, even 'Word' was bought out/in!

"Gates bought Paterson's program, called QDOS, for $50000, and renamed it 'DOS'"

Gates/Msoft was/are a buy-out/bullying, cheating, hard nosed business(man) - more than anything else!

The trail of successful suing against them, is testament to their consistent bad behaviour! ie stealing others ideas/pieces of 'clever' programming etc

"I didn't get where I am today . . . . ."

BomberAF · 08-21-2010

Quote: Originally Posted by neo101

Correct - majority of their software, even 'Word' was bought out/in!

"Gates bought Paterson's program, called QDOS, for $50000, and renamed it 'DOS'"

Gates/Msoft was/are a buy-out/bullying, cheating, hard nosed business(man) - more than anything else!

The trail of successful suing against them, is testament to their consistent bad behaviour! ie stealing others ideas/pieces of 'clever' programming etc

"I didn't get where I am today . . . . ."

I also recall MS about 4 - 5 years ago buying a little known security firm, and low and behold a few years later MSE comes online.

There is a joke about it on the Simpsons where Homer creates a .com business and Gates and a few heavies drop buy and give him a hard time, very funny.

jimbo45 · 08-21-2010

Hi there
No secret -- How does ANYBODY make money -- by providing a product or function that people want WHEN they want it -- and then being anble to SELL IT -- whether it's WHEAT FUTURES on the Chicago exchanges or writing an OS for computers (or buying one from someone else and modifying it appropriately).

You could have the most desirable product in the entire universe but if you (or someone else for you) can't sell it then tough Luck as someone else will see the gap in the Market you've spotted and fill it really quickly.

Whatever the technical merits or otherwise WINDOWS was available when it was needed -- it matters NOT A JOT that a superior product would have been available some time later -- Windows was AVAILABLE when the market needed it.

I think anybody who has an interest in Computing History will readily concur that OS/2 was a far superior product but IBM at that time was only interested in expensive corporate solutions. Windows enabled a small office network say of 3 or 4 computers to achieve some sort of Networking at a reasonable cost and that's what did it.

Cheers
jimbo