07.21.10
Diversity is Good, Proprietary Software Giants Are Not
Summary: Timely perspective on Apple, Microsoft, and the substitution of “Linux” with Android (Google’s trademark)
APPLE may be worth more than Microsoft (as measured in terms of market cap), but this is nothing to be celebrated. In many ways, Apple’s arrogance or Hubris exceeds that of Microsoft, even if Apple’s past hardly contains as much crime as Microsoft’s. It seems like Apple’s revenue may soon exceed Microsoft’s and Joe Wilcox wrote about this before. He does so again:
Today, Apple set the stage for a historical competitive upset: Exceeding Microsoft revenue during the same quarter. Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple’s quarterly earnings again blew past Wall Street consensus, which already were $1.55 billion to $1.75 billion higher than company guidance. Apple also exceed quarterly revenue consensus estimates for Microsoft, which announces fiscal 2010 results on Thursday. I first posted about Apple revenue exceeding Microsoft revenue in April and again in June, not once but twice.
Maggie Shiels, often a booster/apologist for Microsoft at the MSBBC, takes her time across the Atlantic and helps show Apple’s arrogance complex [1, 2], which has turned rather outrageous and contagious. At London I saw many people with hypePhones, but none of them was used for something beyond a game of Tetris or some texting. As we showed here some days ago, the rising star in phones seems to be Linux, so it’s important to ensure that companies like Google keep Android freedom-respecting (which it's becoming less of as time goes by). OpenBytes has this new post titled “PhoneWars 2010 – Android / Apple / Microsoft”; well, actually, Android is not a company name and there are other players in this game (e.g. Nokia with MeeGo, RIM). It’s important never to oversimplify the market, e.g. “Mac versus PC”. Diversity is important and diversity without choice (in the freedom sense) is illusionary and worthless; it’s about selecting one’s masters, often based on brands (PR). █
