5 ms·
not a fair comparison. You are comparing a 5 years old company (publicly) that had huge growth, to a mature one. If you compare current google with msft of t
by ardit33 18y ago
not a fair comparison. You are comparing a 5 years old company (publicly) that had huge growth, to a mature one. If you compare current google with msft of the 80s, you will see that msft actually performed better.
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AMSFT&hl=en http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AMSFT&hl=en (expand the chart to the max timeline, to see the huge ramp growth MSFT had on its earlier years).
If you put a dollar in msft in 86, that would have turned into $6.02 in 1990 and $11.09 in 96.
If you bought a dollar is shares of goog in 2004, you would have about $3.93 now.
So the MSFT of the 80s and early 90s hugely outperfomed the current google. But Microsoft was probably a very different company at the time. As it gets bigger, it would be much hard to sustain the same path of growth.
And all those people that say "google is different", and wont make the same mistakes as MSFT, probably are wrong, as at some point, the sheer size of the company will make it harder to grow, and it will slowly turn just like any other larg corp.
- jrockway 18y agoThe business models are different anyway. Microsoft makes money because they convince people that there is no other choice. Nobody actually likes Windows. It's just the only option. I think people generally like Google's products; they build value by actually building software. Microsoft builds value with marketing. So you can't really compare the development styles and making money. If you compare software quality, I think Microsoft loses big time. Ever use Vista?
- ardit33 18y ago"Nobody actually likes Windows." -- Really? Maybe Vista yes, but between 95-2002 Windows was probably one of the best choices for average Joe. Mac Os, before OS X was not that great (and expensive), plus it was available to only limited hardware, which was way behind wintel peformance wise. And there was of course Linux, and Unix versions, but really would execpt average Joe to have to manually configure drivers, and go back to the 80s and start using command line just to get their computer the net. Sure, now both Mac OS X and Linux are much better choices than Vista, but at the time Win 95/90 then 2000/XP were the best choice for general productivity.
- jrockway 18y ago"the best choice" is not equal to "good". (Have you ever had to vote in a US election?) Windows has always been buggy as hell, and has really made people wary of software in general. If Windows never crashed or did weird things, people would be a lot more comfortable with computers. Actually... Mac OS was slightly better than Windows back in the day. So really, there were better choices than Windows. Windows just happened to be popular, and it got that way by marketing and business tactics, not by software quality. (Did you ever notice how the Mac users in that era were really confident in their abilities? It's probably because the computer didn't treat them like shit. If what you do always works, you'll probably be pretty confident in your abilities. Windows barely worked, so people were afraid of computers.)
- hello_moto 18y agoI used Windows 95. It didn't crash as often as people said it would. Why would I bought Mac OS back then? Any reason other than it doesn't crash as often as Windows? I also used Windows 98, and 98SE. It rarely crashed unless when I did not reboot it more than 2 days. Who left their desktop on for 48 hours (except me for my own reason and probably people who leeched pirated illegal stuff) Ditto with Windows 2000. For desktop, Windows is okay. Yeah so there are viruses due to popularity (or being targeted). If Mac OS 7-9 were more popular back then, it'll suffer the same fate (virus wise). People were always afraid of anything that they don't know how to operate. My parents used OSX once in a while lately. But they're still afraid to click on certain things. They said "If I messed up, I don't know how to get it back to the previous state".
- pg 18y agoIt's largely because Google is a young company and Microsoft is an old one that they have the different approaches to development that they do. The early Microsoft, from what I've heard, depended more on good hackers and less on discipline and organization. So it's not surprising that when they were more like Google, they had growth more like Google's.
- tptacek 18y agoThat sounds good, but you haven't supported it with evidence. MSFT was firing on all cylinders during the mid-90's, when Joel wrote "The Joel Test", noting that Microsoft wasn't conceding anything on process. Microsoft suffers from lack of vision and strategic direction as they do from anything else these days. People still accept 60%-of-industry salaries to work there, after grueling interviews.
- hello_moto 18y agoMS salary is above average for fresh grad. Their benefits are better in overall (depending how you view it I guess). If you're young and single, you probably don't care much of this-n-that. But if you're planning to own a house and family, MS compensates you quite well.
- sanj 18y agoIt is telling that none of you showed THIS graph: http://tinyurl.com/5mv8hv http://tinyurl.com/5mv8hv ie, the competing Microsoft service.