A couple of interesting things popped out to me.<p>Microsoft is surprisingly diversified. It's nice to see their entertainment division has been successful--that's my favorite part of Microsoft (outside Microsoft Research, of course). I wonder if we'll see a separate, significant mobile category in the future.<p>Apple makes a larger amount of money off iOS and less off OS X than I expected. I guess I just see a disproportionate amount of Apple computers around (mostly owned by college students).<p>Google wasn't surprising at all. Of course, this says more about me than Google: I follow Google much more closely than Microsoft or Apple (I actually use Google's products, unlike the other two).<p>It would have been nice to see Amazon here as well. They've been trying some new things; I wonder how it's been working. (But not enough to go look myself :p.)<p>It'll be interesting to see Facebook in the future too.
Excuse me for asking, but when we speak of revenue - we aren't speaking of profits are we? (I'm from the UK.)<p>We have no idea of the net income for those divisions, as the expenses are missing.<p>I'd have thought, the cost of advertising would be far less than producing say a hardware unit like an iPhone.<p>I'd expect the wedges to be different if we saw the charts listing profits, and that would be more interesting. Or am I missing something?
After looking at the data a bit, it came to me why coming up with a single coherent strategy is so hard for Microsoft - they have 4 equally important product lines. If you ask someone what Microsoft makes, they'll answer 4 different versions, each one incorrect, because none of them accounts for more than a third of the company revenue.<p>Apple has a much clearer picture - they are an iOS company that sells iOS devices and their accessories, such as the Macs that connect to them. It seems they have successfully invented the product that was to take "Apple Computer" out of business - and are selling vast numbers of them.<p>For Google, it's even clearer. They have one product - user attention. Still, that's a dangerous place to be in - they must invent the company that will wipe Google out before someone else does it.
The funny thing would be to animate those charts for the few last years. Microsoft and Google would not change much, but Apple's pie would be changing like crazy: no iPhone prior to 2007, no iPad before 2010.
I'm surprised to see such a large chunk of Microsoft's revenue coming from "online services". Does anyone know what this is - surely it can't be from Bing?<p>Also I've noticed that there's no segment in Apple's chart for App Store commissions, nor from iTunes. Is this classified under "other music", or are those divisions so small they don't fit in the chart?
I think that the data presented here is really interesting -- it presents an obvious root cause for decisions and what might be driving those decisions.<p>However, presenting the data with pie charts isn't really acceptable. 3d pie charts, even less acceptable. And 3d pie charts with gradient shading is worse still. If you want readers to take data-driven articles seriously, please learn even the basics of data visualization and how to best demonstrate the differences in data, and how to further compare the data contained. A side-by-side stacked bar chart would allow viewers to easily compare values relative to each other within the bar chart, and also to visually compare across the 3 companies.
Apple got most of the revenue from iPhone and iPad products that appeared just few years ago. iOS devices drives sales of other Apple products such as macbooks for sure so we could speculate how small revenue would be without these devices.
> What business is Google in? If you said search, guess again.<p>Really? Advertising, search ... semantics. Everyone knows that AdSense/Adwords is Googles money making machine