Hacker News Reader

Comment by galogon | Hacker News Reader

Why is Apple's market cap so much higher than Microsoft and Alphabet?

-Google: Search and YouTube are essential in everyone's lives.

-Microsoft, the entire business world depend on their apps and services. The world wouldn't run without Azure, Windows and Office.

Their businesses are bulletproof. Apple on the other hand is completely dependant on China and you never know when a supplier drops the ball somewhere in the chain.

View on HN

> Why is Apple's market cap so much higher than Microsoft and Alphabet?

Because Apple brings in more revenue than Google ( 50% more ) and MSFT ( 100% more ) and they bring in more income than google and msft.

> Their businesses are bulletproof.

Apple has people tied to their entire stack ( hardware, OS, apps, store, etc ). I'd say apple's business is more bulletproof than google or microsoft.

> Apple on the other hand is completely dependant on China and you never know when a supplier drops the ball somewhere in the chain.

They are tied to the largest economy in the world? An economy that is set to double or triple the size of the US economy in the next few decades?

It's amazing what Apple has done. Nobody 20 years ago would have predicted they'd make $200 billion more in revenue than microsoft.

Apple has done astonishingly well in the last 20 years, but the entire professional world runs on Excel and it has done for decades. There is no way that changes any time soon.

Apple's services business is growing rapidly but they're all consumer-facing and easy to cut if times get tough.

AAPL generates 100B of income while MSFT 71B and GOOGL 76B.

Apple hardware is 40+% profit.

Which is amazing to me. I always figure HW companies are at a disadvantage. If I write a piece of SW I pay for the NRE once and then more or less make free money on the continuing sales. If I sell HW I have to pay for NRE and then materials, production, logistics, etc for each unit sold. Pure software can scale really well if you don't need to customize it for each user.

Well Apple's trick is that their hardware is the only way to access their software, so they don't need to rely on a hardware advantage to keep their margins, because while some people are buying the hardware, most are buying access to the software.

For the Mac lineup, it’s hard to say that their software is the reason people buy their laptops (it’s not that Mac OS is bad, just that it’s a small difference in the overall experience in the grand scheme, in if anything, is more limited than windows in term of apps/games support)

Do people still use Office? Google docs gets you 99% of the way there. Haven’t touched Office in a decade.

Google docs gets you 99% of the way there so long as you are doing a simple task, like a simple data table or a simple letter. For simple tasks it’s very user friendly and efficient. But it lacks features to do anything more complicated than that.

Like what? (Honest question)

Aside from being a native app which is faster and more reliable, and works without an internet connection, and you can be confident that Office will always open a document you've been sent as intended with all features. Aide from that, the main missing features are in excel. Sheets is missing hundreds of functions and lots of customisation/features in its charts, pivot tables, and data analysis functionality. It also can't handle large data sets (30k+ rows) which you'll run into regularly with any kind of data logging.

It is possible you will never use these functions, but the entire professional world runs on excel sheets and registers (even though there is probably a tool somewhere that would work better for individual use cases). The universal compatibility is very valuable and the cost is negligible for businesses.

It’s funny you should say that because I was joking with someone the other day about google workspaces “the only thing google docs needs is a decent editor (vim),” but in seriousness, if you are referring to vbscript or macros then you are missing the market that google is aiming at.

I'll take a project to develop some automation in Google Apps Script any day before I take a VB scripting job.

Yes a lot of people still use Office, especially Excel

Google docs get you 99% there. But Microsoft's moat is in the 1%. e.g Finance and other niche stuff where the programming language is Excel.

Really? This feigned ignorance is like the old canard “do people still watch TV? I haven’t watched TV in 20 years”

Well, in some large companies, legal documents are managed by contract management systems which generate the documents in MS Word format. So the embedding is deep. I'm sure I could open it in Google Docs... but then I'd have two problems.

Source: I just received such a thing.

If it's your job, you want the best thing, even if it's only 10-20% better. Performance and offline capability of a native app alone is a strong selling point.

"People" don't buy office. Corporations buy office, and Google docs doesn't get you anywhere near 99% of the way towards what corporations need from Office. There are entire workflows built around janky plugins to explorer, reams of VBA macros, retention policies in exchange etc.

They capture a lot of slices of: mobile.

More words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QbG1wOQw8g.

>Microsoft, the entire business world depend on their apps and services. The world wouldn't run without Azure, Windows and Office.

Funnily, no one at the office (a dozen colleagues, in a European software editing company) and in my family uses any Microsoft service – except for LinkedIn, Github and npm.

Every fortune 500 company I've interacted with has a contract for microsoft's productivity suite. As they continue down the "github is the entire productivity suite for developers" that will only continue. The lock in they've got provides incredible value, and IMO is the main reason azure is even kind of successful.

None of my previous employers was MSFT free. Not one.

Sharepoint especially is killer software for any non trivial org.

Might it be because everyone and their mum have an iPhone and iPad and the profit margin on that hardware alone on that scale are super high?

One big reason is hardware. Apple's hardware business is multiple times that of Microsoft and Google combined. And hardware business may be little low profit, but it's more stable and long term profits are more or less guaranteed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com