Tech industry general discussion thread

I feel like there's not enough threads that just discuss random bits of tech news that don't really warrant their own thread, so in the spirit of OT threads of similar dispositions, I'm opening one here.

The Verge has some neat graphs comparing revenues, profits and margins at Apple, Microsoft and Google. Basically, Apple has historically had much higher gross revenues and profits than either of the other two, but the gap has narrowed enormously in recent quarters. Additionally, MS has the highest net profit margins of the 3, and this has been fairly consistent for the past 2.5 years or so.

Well, historically for the past three years, Apple only passed MS in revenue in 2010 for the first time ever.

Apple's in a weird position where their best products (their PCs) are making them almost no money compared to their products that I don't see as particularly compelling (their phones and tablets), particularly due to trying to eke out profit margins out of hardware, when pretty much nobody else in the world other than Samsung is making any money on hardware. They're way down on profit due to the ipad mini, ipad 2, etc., but they're still at the point where their cheapest phone is over three years old and costs literally four and a half time more than their competitors'. I expect that long-term, marketshare of Apple PCs and Apple tablets/phones will equalize to about the same spot.

MS is very nicely diversified, the recent corporate reorg muddles thing and the recent Surface RT writedown showed ridiculous sales expectations for it, but they've got a legit four different billion dollar plus divisions, as opposed to Apple (99% hardware) or Google (99% ads). This lets them makes very long plays - XB1 could the the first gen xbox that's net profitable, online services might be profitable within the decade, they'll keep throwing money at mobile until it works. (They just promoted the head of Windows Phone to lead all windows/XB/mobile operating systems.)

I'm not big on Google, all their revenue comes from ads, so they've got all kinds of conflicts of interest in trying to make the best products possible vs. selling more ads. Their best products (Google+ - nobody uses it, Google Glass - not out yet, self-driving cars - not out yet) don't actually make any money for them. There's talk that MS makes more money from patent royalties on Android than Google does in total on the platform. It's kind of funny watching them lose hundreds of millions of $ per quarter on Motorola now as they fail to compete with sub-par Samsung phones.

Surely search is their best product?

I mean in comparison to competitors - other than Docs/Office their online services (including search) are by-and-large comparable to MS ones. On the other hand, Google+ is much better than Facebook, and Glass/cars are years ahead of anyone else.

I would say that Google's search is better than MS's search by at least as much as Google+ is better than Facebook.

EDIT: I think that search is much more "commoditised" than social networks are though. Search does 1 thing and is judged on its ability to do that 1 thing, whereas there is much more room for product differentiation in social networks. To that extent I take your point.

Bing doesn't do as well as google at searching. Their hilarious autocomplete manipulation on xbox one's press release did not do them any favors. They also got caught hijacking search results a while back if I remember correctly.

Also don't forget google maps and how revolutionary street view was/is. Maps is another google stalwart that is superior to the competition IMHO. Google enterprise for business is also nice and cheap.

Do you guys actually use Bing on a regular basis? I use Google/Bing at a about an even split throughout my day, and while I might give Google a slight edge, they really aren't much different in regular use. Google does better if you're bad at formatting queries and insist on punching in vague natural-language questions. Google lately got rid of the ability to filter out specific sites, so you'll often search for something now and get a pageful of worthless results from youtube/yummly/expertsexchange/etc.

Google v Bing maps depends a lot on location - in my location:

Google:
Sreetview (Bing streetside is nicer technically than streetview, but not available in my city.)
POI (Better POI database than bing)

Bing:
Bird's Eye (Better than any vertical imagery Google has)
Traffic (Marks accidents and construction in realtime in addition to traffic flow.)

Google for business is roughly the same price as Office 365, except Google Docs isn't nearly as good as Office web apps.

I just fooled around with MS's streetview equivalent. There is not as much coverage (not even close) the pictures are not as high quality as Google's, and it was slower. Google maps also just looks better. They are more readable and show more stuff.

With things like search and maps, even if the difference is slight, why use the inferior product? Also Google's ubiquity helps their maps get better since so many people use them and update them.

Well I use duckduckgo (which frankly is really bad), and startpage in the likely event that ddg doesn't show the thing I want on the first page.

Bing Maps has the correct colours for the roads, which frankly trumps everything Google has.

illram said:

I just fooled around with MS's streetview equivalent. There is not as much coverage (not even close) the pictures are not as high quality as Google's, and it was slower.

Click to expand...

I'll defer to you on that, I don't really use MS's streetview since it doesn't have any coverage here, so I've got minimal experience with it.

I don't really use streetview either, for that matter.

illram said:

Google maps also just looks better. They are more readable and show more stuff.

Click to expand...

I suspect that's mostly a matter of familiarity, though Bing shows way more stuff for me.

illram said:

With things like search and maps, even if the difference is slight, why use the inferior product?

Click to expand...

Well, I don't really believe that either is particularly better than the other. I use both because they have different strengths and I work in the industry so like to stay current with what they're doing.

The difference in Google results between being logged in to your account or using someone else's pc is really really big though. I was surprised by this when I wanted to show things to friends. My first hit on google didn't even show on the first page for them.

I'm always logged into my Google account since their search is basically unusable with Google Instant enabled.

Also, I like how Google is extrapolating tablet sales:

I told my dad to invest in Google stock. We could be living the good life now but he didn't listen. He's an idiot.

Well tablets are a lot cheaper than PCs so I'm not sure that that's such a bizarre thing to suggest. And there's no reason to believe that they're just extrapolating from past sales either: there could be a pretty good model behind it, as you would expect with Google...

Mise said:

And there's no reason to believe that they're just extrapolating from past sales either: there could be a pretty good model behind it, as you would expect with Google...

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Those are hardly mutually exclusive.

Well you seemed to be suggesting that they were just looking at the direction of the curve and extrapolating. I'd imagine their model for consumer demand is far more sophisticated than that.

Tablet sales don't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Samsung is by far and away the top non-Apple tablet manufacturer, but by all accounts the Nexus 10 has had dismal sales, and I never see any of their tablets in the wild, so I have no idea who's actually buying them. All I ever see are free Samsung tablets for various promotions businesses are running. On top of that, neither the price nor the quality of Samsung tablets is particularly good. (Pretty much like their phones.)

After Samsung you get Asus, mostly based on the strength of the Nexus 7 (though their more expensive tablets are quality) and Amazon with their zero-profit ad-machines.

It would be nice if Apple was able to keep a bigger marketshare in tablets to encourage good prices for good quality, versus rock-bottom prices like has happened in the PC realm, where the average laptop is around $400 and terrible, and Apple completely dominates the $1000+ segment, but with obscene markups.

I honestly thing Samsung's 'dominance' (quote unquote because they're second rate to apple) is a temporary thing. Then again so is Apple's dominance itself honestly.

The reason I say this is think about how Windows got the vast majority of the marketshare despite the perfection of OSX.

The reason for this is Microsoft allows anyone to run a computer on Windows whereas Apple requires you to buy their own computer to get OSX. What I'm saying is the real profit is in the software, not the hardware.

Anytime anyone buys an Android product (regardless of whether Samsung is the manufacturer or not) Google profits. Google is going to be the next Microsoft in this regard considering Tablets and such are making PC's dwindle more and more each year. Even if Samsung grows more and more, they're still using Android so Google still wins regardless.

Microsoft profits more from Samsung selling an Android phone than Google does.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/07/19/microsoft-is-getting-rich-on-android/

Obviously Microsoft has invested some stake in this, but I didn't see anything in that article that inferred they are profiting more than Google based off the android OS. edit: It's not just android phones. What about Android tablets?