This time is different. It's like comparing apples to lemons (pun intended). IBM is now a professional services company. They have almost half a million employ

This time is different. It's like comparing apples to lemons (pun intended). IBM is now a professional services company. They have almost half a million employees worldwide, not considering the many thousands of contractors. That's 5x more people than Apple. IBM is in the business of 1) selling people's time, and 2) selling some software, to justify selling even more of people's time. Hardware is not a priority anymore. Those who have worked in professional services industry know there's a cap on how much you can charge for each employee. Maybe 2-3x the salary, which will get you to the $200-250K range. Maybe a bit more if you have teams with unique skills (e.g., lawyers, scientists, creative talents), but nothing even close to the revenue per capita that a product-based company commands. Case in point: IBM just got to #1 position on AdAge's ranking of digital marketing agencies [1]. Yes, digital marketing agency. A few years ago they weren't even showing up in the rankings. Apple, on the other hand, is in the business of creating products out of hardware + software. That requires a much smaller scale, given that 80% of the manufacturing is outsourced. So when you look at the revenue per employee, you'll end up with much bigger numbers. But a better comparison would be to add all the employees of Apple's direct suppliers. Just Foxconn, for example, has 1.29M employees and 40% of its revenue coming from Apple. Add it all up, and things start to look a lot more similar to IBM. [1] http://adage.com/article/agency-news/2014-agency-report-revenue-staffing-stocks-digital/292849/ http://adage.com/article/agency-news/2014-agency-report-reve...