Apple Shines, Windows Declines
Apple is doing just fine without its fearless leader Steve Jobs (and the way Jobs handled his illness, fearless is an understatement). iPads and iPhones are flying off the shelf. In fact, I can get an iPhone April 16 when the Verizon lease on my Blackberry expires.
Basically from year to the next, Apple doubled most everything. I thought my eyes were buggy when I read that first quarter profit was over $13 billion. Didn't they mean revenue? Nope, that was over $46 billion for the quarter. Year over year iPad and iPhone sales have doubled. In one year Apple sold over 37 million phones. Now iPad has an installed base of 55 million, and there are 65 million users of the fairly new iCloud service.
Apple has more than double Microsoft's quarterly revenue and double the profit. While Microsoft continues to grow quarter over quarter, it is getting smoked by Apple.
The fundamentals for Microsoft are excellent, it is just that growth is no longer explosive -- Â more like a steadily growing ember fed by scraps.
Some might see bad news in the fact that Windows revenue declined 6 percent. As someone who follows Azure and Office 365, I see this as a great Microsoft opportunity, to move legacy apps and data into a new cloud world.
So guess who had a bum quarter? How about Google. Sure, it grew like they always did, with revenue and profit roughly half of what Microsoft reported. But Wall Street wanted more, and disappointed traders immediately drove Google shares down 9 percent.
What is your best and worst tech investment? Spill the beans at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 01/27/2012 at 1:19 PM