Microsoft's Biggest Threat - Google or Open Source? 240
Glyn Moody writes "Google always plays down suggestions that there's any looming clash of the titans between itself and Microsoft. Meanwhile, the search giant is pushing open source in every way it can. They're contributing directly by contributing code to projects and employing top hackers like Andrew Morton, Jeremy Allison and Guido van Rossum, and indirectly through the $60 million fees it pays Mozilla, its Summer of Code scheme and various open source summits held at its offices. Google+OSS: could this be the killer combination that finally breaks Microsoft?"
Re:Not according to Sergey (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Missing option.. (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month [wikipedia.org]
Re:The True Measure (Score:4, Informative)
MSFT: $12,599,000,000
IBM: $9,492,000,000
GOOG: $3,077,446,000
What is amazing is Google's growth:
2006 - $3,077,446,000
2006 - $1,465,397,000
2006 - $399,119,000
The money machine which is Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft had a stand-out first quarter.
Each of the company's five business divisions showed double-digit revenue growth.
That was particularly important in the Client Div., the group where Microsoft counts Windows sales. There, revenue jumped 25%, to $4.1 billion, an astonishing gain for a mature market Microsoft Results Turn Heads [businessweek.com]
Retail sales of Office 2007 have been breathtaking, numbers so big that they are difficult to grasp:
Through end of November, U.S. retail PC software sales are up 10.3 percent year over year as measured in dollar volume...By comparison, Office sales are up 50.7 percent, by the same measure and in the same time frame.
"Here's the really interesting statistic," said...NPD's director of Software Industry Analysis. "Over two-thirds of the dollar volume growth in the U.S. retail PC software market in 2007 can be attributed to Microsoft Office. In other words, the ratio of Office dollar growth to total PC software growth is 67 percent."
The "magnitude of Office sales relative to the rest of the PC software market" is phenomenal, "It's the massively huge tail wagging the dog. If the senior execs at Best Buy, Office Depot, etc. don't buy Jeff Raikes [president of Microsoft's Business division] a beer the next time he's in town, something is seriously wrong." The Year of Office 2007 [microsoft-watch.com]
Microsoft hasn't forgotten the Mac. From the same story:
For Black Friday, Microsoft offered a surprising deal: for about 56 bucks, after rebates, Office 2004 Student and Teacher Edition and the forthcoming Office 2008 Special Media Edition. The new, top-of-the-line Mac Office version would otherwise sell for about $500.
As measured in dollars, U.S. retail Black Friday sales of Mac Office were up 215.8 percent.