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not the same order of magnitude. MS mainly lives, and males money, off selling Windows and Office. These two are a huge portion of their revenues and profits, and are pure software. Peripherals, xbox, zune are more sideshows, probably even smaller than MS's server line.
http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Microsoft_(MSFT)/Data/Revenue_Breakdown

OTOH, Apple do not sell any significant amount of software apart from their devices' OS. That OS is a major "leg" of Apple's competitive advantage, but it's available only linked to a hardware sale. They don' even allow you to run it on anything but a Mac.
http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-Q3-2009-by-the-numbers/1248218543.

As for the in-house part, Apple also design their hardware, including the CPU, in-house. Would you call Dell not a hardware company because they outsource most of their manufacturing ?

Where did you get $13 billion?

I looked up BP's 2009 revenue and came up with $246.14 billion

Also I think your confusing and/or commingling taxes and royalties

The government collects production royalties to compensate the general public for the market value of the resources that businesses remove from public lands.

It's not BP's oil, it the people of the United States oil. We agreed to let them take it out of our ground and sell it, if they give us a share. That's not a tax.

Their business is telephones, not software.

Let's look at AT&T's revenue: http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/AT&T_(T)/Data/Revenue_Breakdown

You'll find a lot of telecommunication services, but nothing to do with selling telephones.

Aren't the telecommunication service providers in the business of (duh) providing a telecommunication service? The phones are just a marketing gimmick they give you so you'll lock yourself into a highly overpriced subscription for two years (in the US, at least; in Denmark it's six months, and you can get really cheap subscriptions if you bring your own phone: 4 cents/sms, 13 cents/minute, 50 free sms and minutes per month).

Besides its hard to compete with slave labor....

Where is this slave labor? None of those Chinese are chained or watched over by a shotgun toting guard. Instead Chinese compeat with each other to get good jobs. It is a lie to say they're slaves just because you don't want to compeat with them.

Quite simply China's middle class is growing. The thing US businesses need to figure out is what can they export and sell to the middle, and upper, class in China.

You couldn't possibly be more wrong. In 2008, client OS sales accounted for nearly a third of revenue and almost half of their income. Try reading MSFT's Annual Reports sometime.

...Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, how those government sponsored enterprises acted as ATMs

A lie. Fannie Mae specifically didn't have any US backing on the paper it gave out. And probably the same for Freddie Mac.

It's not a lie. The simple fact is they are government created entities fulfilling a government mission - just like the post office. And like the post office, they are exempt from the rules that private companies are bound to follow.

Created by the federal government in 1938, Fannie Mae was given a range of special privileges, including exemption from state and local taxes, a $2.25 billion line of credit with the U.S. Treasury, and the implicit backing of the federal government. Fannie Mae is a government sponsored entity, a hybridized enterprise endowed with an advantageous set of special privileges. Source

And both of those entities - regardless of official policy - made private representations to lenders that the government had their backs, and Republicans were trying to stop this.

Washington-based Fannie and McLean, Va.-based Freddie are the engines behind a complex process of buying, bundling and selling mortgages that remains a mystery to millions of Americans whose home loans pass through this system. Together Fannie and Freddie hold or guarantee about $5 trillion in mortgage debt â" about half of the nation's total.

They traditionally backed the safest loans, 30-year fixed rate mortgages that required a down payment of at least 20 percent. But in recent years, they lowered their standards dramatically, matching a decline fueled by Wall Street banks that backed the now-defunct subprime lending industry.

Armando Falcon, who clashed frequently with the companies during his six years as Fannie and Freddie's chief government regulator, said in an interview last month that the companies' woes are similar to the downfall of other major corporate titans like Enron and WorldCom earlier this decade. "It boils down to a whole lot of greed and arrogance," he said.

The companies, he said, took advantage of the perception on Wall Street that the government would stand behind them in a time of crisis, as is now the case. Source

****

Dems forced banks to lend to those with bad credit

I keep hearing this. Show me one example where a bank was forced to loan out money to someone and where they instead couldn't have said "fuck this I am not lending any more money with these kind of unprofitable regulations."

More than an example (since I have no access to bank loan records or to the private conversations of bankers), I'll just point out to you that dramatically expanding the subprime lending market was the whole purpose and effect of the Clinton's Expansion of CRA. Just Google "Clinton CRA subprime" to see what the effects were.

Howard Husock warned of all of this in 2001: The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities.

And again, what did Democrats say during 2003 hearings on this problem?

You of course already know how a monopoly is broken because it happens so frequently. Y'know, cuz like... it's always in the news that our government breaks monothic companies like Microsoft or Halliburton into pieces to foster competition, create free markets, and promote options for the consumer.

Regardless, here is a handy chart to illustrate how Ma Bell was broken up in '84 and what has happened since. Stephen Colbert broke it down nicely here, although that link has been removed do to copyright claims by Viacom, one of our six global media conglomerates.

Thank goodness you can still watch it in Canada.

Of all the AT&T derivatives... we know Qwest didn't spy on us. So that's one.

W