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Who Will Win the Battle of the Technology Giants?
As technology becomes more and more advanced, the lines that were once so clear between products and services have increasingly blurred—and in some cases, have vanished altogether. In an attempt to capture as much of the public’s technological attention as possible, a few major players have emerged in what seems to be an all-out war for superiority.
Where They Started
Apple Inc.
Apple was established in 1976 as a consumer computer hardware company. Today, Apple Inc. is an international corporation that designs, develops and markets a wide range of electronic devices including Macintosh computers, the iPod, the iPad, and the iPhone.
Market capitalization: $355 billion.
Microsoft Corporation
Established in 1975, Microsoft Corp. rose to prominence in the 1980s with its dominant home computer operating system, MS-DOS, and later with Microsoft Windows. Since those early days, the company has diversified its offerings to include the Microsoft Office productivity software suite, Xbox and Xbox 360 video gaming system, Windows Mobile operating system, and more.
Market capitalization: $214 billion.
Google Inc.
Google Inc. is an international search technology company founded in 1998. Google processes more than one billion unique search requests every day and is responsible for the popular Android mobile operating system, as well as social networking and cloud computing applications, and the Chrome operating system.
Market capitalization: $180 billion.
Facebook founder and current CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched what would become the world’s most popular social networking site in 2004, when he was just a sophomore at Harvard. Since then, Facebook has added millions of users, more than 500 million of which are active on the site each month. Users can connect with friends, share photos, send messages, view profile information, and much more.
Facebook has yet to initiate a public offering, but following a recent private sale of its shares, the company is estimated to be valued at $67 billion
What They are Fighting For?
Your Computing Platform
Microsoft has firmly owned the operating system market for the last 25 years but its crown has been slipping in favor of Apple over the last five years. Microsoft’s share of the OS market slipped by 3% in 2011, with Apple responsible for most of that. Google is also attacking the OS market head on, having extended the capabilities of its Chrome web browser into a full operating system in 2010. So, with its core market under extreme threat, Microsoft is taking the fight with Apple and Google into their own markets.
Search Supremacy
Google has long dominated Internet search, but Facebook is looking to break into the fray thanks to its intuitive information gathering technology. Adding to Facebook’s arsenal is the sheer volume of its user base and the amount of time registered users spend on the site, on average, each day; Facebook’s recent partnership with Microsoft’s Bing search engine has further strengthened its case against Google. If Facebook and Microsoft can manage to perfect an integrated platform, it could easily eclipse Google as the most accurate and personalized search engine ever. Google share of standard web searches is already slipping, with its share falling from 82% to 80% in 2011 in favour of Bing.
Controlling the Social Network
Once again, the two dominant players in the relatively new social networking skirmish are Google and Facebook. While Facebook has been the undisputed champion of the arena for years, Google is making moves to challenge with its new Google Plus platform. The key component of Google’s approach is “Circles,” which lets users organize connections based on relationships and common interests, and then choose the information that is shared with those groups. While Google Plus is the latest in a string of unsuccessful attempts by the search giant to break into social media, the site had already registered nearly 20 million users in just its first few weeks of beta testing.
Mobile Management
At present, the battle for smartphone superiority is split between Google’s Android platform and Apple’s iPhone. Though Android is compatible with more devices and more carriers and made up more than half of all smartphones sold in the first quarter of 2011, as of June 2011 iPhone sales had jumped more than 142% over the previous year, with 64 million devices sold in the twelve months to June. While Microsoft has been working on its own mobile operating system, a recent Nielsen survey reported that only 7 percent of respondents said they planned to buy a Windows smartphone. Microsoft is hoping its partnership with Nokia will help boost its worldwide mobile profile.
Who Will Come Out on Top?
While Facebook owns the social network, it remains to be seen whether Zuckerberg and company can make a similarly significant impact in other sectors. Google has enjoyed much success with both search and Android mobile, yet the company is currently involved in so many diverse projects that it is difficult to ascertain where their focus lies. The rumors of Microsoft’s decline have been exaggerated, it seems, given that their 2011 fiscal year-end revenue was a record-setting $69.94 billion.
Apple, however, is poised to be the big winner in the tech wars based simply on seemingly unlimited resources and a surge in popularity that does not appear to be weakening. Over the past year, Apple Inc. has pulled in more than $100 billion—that’s $30 billion more than Microsoft for the same period. Moreover, just two of Apple’s products, the iPhone and the iPad, are bringing in more money than all of Microsoft’s businesses combined.
Those are numbers that simply cannot be ignored.
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