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Comment by ariwilson | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to note that Microsoft's revenue, operating income, and net income are all now lower than Google's (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2017-Q1...).

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And Google is zooming past at an incredible 20% YoY growth rate while MSFT is basically stagnant.

As someone that is very naive when it comes to earnings reports, do you mind explaining why this is interesting?

Because Microsoft is a more traditional software company, selling software licenses, plus their once dominant market share.

Microsoft used to be the 800 pound gorilla in the tech space. No one even came close to it in size. Now Alphabet (and presumably Apple, though verify the numbers) are bigger than it by every conceivable relevant metric.

Growing up (1996-2006), I remember every software industry article was either excited about what Microsoft would do next in some space or terrified that Microsoft would step in and destroy some business. Due to this, there are now a generation of people with an atavistic fear of Microsoft.

See also embrace, extend and extinguish:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

And our original host noted the sea change when Microsoft stopped being that 800 pound gorilla: http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Apple has more revenue and net income(latest quarter @ $46.9bn and $9bn) than Google and Microsoft combined.

Adding to what others said, slashdot.org was the water-cooler news site back then and the icon for Microsoft was a borgified Bill Gates.

Microsoft did everything it could to destroy openness in the software world. They wrote that the GPL was a virus, hired prominent heads of open source projects like Miguel de Icaza and the name of the Gentoo guy who I forget, and nothing really became of those projects afterwards. And of course there was Netscape and IE up through IE8, IE6 being the most infamous.

Yeah... Microsoft was the bad guy on the block.

(edit: misspelled Gentoo)

It was depressing seeing how MS treated OSS on their own ecosystem (.net). For every good project MS would release there own inferior clone and the whole ecosystem was left worse off.

Microsoft ate their own platform is what it was and then people stopped developing for them. That was one really big reason why the web became a thing. Everything used to run on the desktop. Microsoft quashed that, and then Google came along, made search, maps and mail work. Firefox and Opera (and yes, Safari) circumvented IE; Google pretty much funded Mozilla for Firefox until it came out with Chrome, basing off of Apple's webkit.

It's remarkable that those of us in the Linux world spent so much time trying to unseat Microsoft from the desktop, and what did it in the end was Google and Apple simply working around the Microsoft/Intel (i.e. "Wintel") monopoly.

But the way they quashed it is instructive: every few years they'd come up with some New, Improved way of doing it, and depreciating the old. People got sick and tired of learning the latest arcane, hard to program, generally with some degree of buggyness, poorly documented approach, only to have that become obsolete, and put what they'd created in jeopardy.

Well summed up. Somehow though, the GPL won in the end.

And funded the SCO Group v. The World lawsuit.

On the other hand, in the early days IE beat Netscape fair and square in the technical domain, by engineering a vastly better browser, I think it was faster, and it was definitely a lot more stable. And let's not forget how they got AJAX started.

One of the "secrets" of Microsoft's success in those days was their ability to consistently write software that basically worked, something that allowed the dominance of their Office suite when all their competitors but WordPerfect completely failed to get a working Windows version of their software, and WordPerfect didn't crash but had intolerable bugs, like your figures and tables repeatedly moving themselves to the bottom of your document (as reported by a lawyer co-worker and friend who had been a big fan of it on MS-DOS).

My favorite is the OS/2 2.0 fiasco, of course.

Alphabet is much more diversified than Msft ever was.

No theyre not. Google earns 90% of it's revenue from essentially the same intent based advertising model across platforms.

It's the "across platforms" part that matters here. Microsoft lost the battle in their core business (OS and Apps) when platforms switched to, first Web then Mobile. Google started with Web on desktop and successfully continued their dominance to Mobile web and apps. To add insult to injury, Google added the dominant mobile OS to their arsenal right under Microsoft's nose.

Not sure why were both downvoted. Haha. They broke the mold on advertising via internet.

The key is how and why they got there. They're diversified across platforms and entry points. It also allows them to fund their other "bets" which they don't individually report. Cloud as well.

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