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Not to take anything away from Bill Gates, but he always had a million dollar trust fund to fall back on.

(Source: http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/)

You're entirely correct, but what always amazes me, is the amount of time I spend on MS software, but if you look at the market cap of MS vs Oracle vs Apple, something seems out of whack.

234.89B MSFT 112.40B Oracle 170.08B AAPL

I can kinda see why apple is worth so much, although, of all apple consumers, how many hours a day do they spend on Apple vs how many on MS. And I really don't even see how Oracle is in this same race, but they are.

I suspect that Oracle is responsible for a lot of "invisible" software that runs some really important systems. Apple is big because of their portable consumer electronics as much as because of the Mac, and the typical consumer probably spends more time with their phone or music player than their computer. FWIW, I use Microsoft software maybe once a week at best, and I don't use anything by Apple (unless you count CUPS).

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