Apple vs. Microsoft, By the Numbers

CWmike writes "It's a matter of opinion which company makes the better operating system or is likely to grow its smartphone market share. But numbers don't lie — or exaggerate. A little less than a year ago, Wall Street reached a Microsoft vs. Apple milestone: for the first time, Apple's corporate value surpassed Microsoft's. What has happened since? With Apple due to report its latest quarterly earnings on Wednesday — Microsoft reports its numbers next week — we look at some recent numbers, as well as data over time."

Comments

Agreed.

[mosb1000]

I'm going to have to agree. I don't know anyone who is planning to get (or is excited about the possibility of getting) a windows phone. Add the fact that many (most) companies are now supporting iOS and Android on their corporate networks, and what you come up with is a market already filled with devices superior to anything Microsoft could offer. No one is going to willingly downgrade to a windows phone.

Re:Agreed.

[terjeber]

No one is going to willingly downgrade to a windows phone.

Just for the record, I upgraded from iPhone to WP7 this year. A little by accident. Developing for mobile I have to keep tabs on what goes on, so I have an iPhone 3GS, a Galaxy Tab and I got a WP7 phone just before Christmas. I was not expecting it to be my main phone, which at the time was the iPhone, so I just got the cheapest they had, the LG.

I was immediately impressed with the development environment which is at least a generation ahead of Android and even more ahead of Apple (gawd I hate Objective-C). I doodled some apps. Worked on it for a while. I found my self grabbing the WP7 phone more and more and suddenly I found I preferred it over the other two.

Does the phone have shortcomings? Fewer now that the first update is out, but sure, it does. It is still a significantly improved user experience over iOS though. Given what we saw at Mix, the Microsoft lead over Apple in phone usability will take another significant leap forward. Honestly, nobody innovates on the phone like Microsoft at the moment. It took a while to get started, but as some of the other Microsoft teams, the WP7 team is world class with a great product.

Sadly I think a number of developers, particularly of the ilk that reads /. are making judgements mostly on their own superstition. Microsoft of 2011 is not Microsoft of 1999. There is a significant improvement, and many Microsoft products, like C# - which has jumped far, far ahead of Java now, .NET MVC and others, are really quite good. In my current job I integrate JBoss and Microsoft solutions. Working in Eclipse on Linux is a huge step backwards compared to VS2010 on Windows.

Before concluding I am a MS fanboi, I have been working almost exclusively in Java since early 1997 and was part of one of the very early companies to make serious money on a commercial Java product. In the beginning we had to carefully wrap our Java stuff in C front-ends to make sure our customers didn't notice it was Java. If they had, at the time they would have rejected it, since everybody "knew" at the time that Java was too slow to use for anything real.