Hacker News Reader

Comment by norswap | Hacker News Reader

I'm not too convinced by the relevance of these groupings (GAFA vs Wintel). For one, Intel is a hardware company. And Microsoft seems to do well in a lot of key areas.

Also, isn't Oracle on the same scale as the other that are mentioned?

View on HN

The dude has interesting thoughts but hates MS and loves Apple to the point of blindness.

Oracle should have been mentioned. Author certainly seems to have a bias. Can't say he was trying to look at consumer facing companies since Intel never was really that way close to as much as the other five. Oracle probably should've been included.

Apple is also mostly a hardware company.

All four of them build hardware, to one degree or another and apple designs it’s own chipsets.

Apple is almost entirely a hardware company, revenue-wise. Microsoft is almost entirely a software company. Amazon is a retail (revenue-wise) and IaaS (profit-wise) company. Facebook and Google are advertising companies.

Apple has been aiming for 20% of their revenue to be services. Though really they are mostly tied to their hardware. Much like Microsoft hardware, Surface, which is doing better than I was expecting, is there for their software like you state. And Google's successful ventures like Android and Chrome are there for keeping their data and advertising going.

Even if they achieve that, they are still a hardware company, because those services are linked to the vendor lockin they've spent years cultivating. Nobody would use any of their services without the hardware, so they will always be a hardware company in the end.

Yeah for sure.

You could argue that Apple's software, or more specifically its design and user interface, is what really launched it out of the park. Online-connected keyboard phones did exist when the iPhone came out.

So they make their money selling hardware, but who would buy that hardware if it weren't for the ecosystem? Their software is pretty shite now - major OSX upgrades have the stability of old Windows ones nowadays - but they still take their users' privacy and security seriously, and they have platform lock-in. Their hardware still isn't what REALLY makes them money.

Apple is a media company that happens to sell phones, tablets, laptops, smart watches, and desktop computers

I agree. Comparing 4 to 2 survivors to 1 survivor isn't a great comparison. I still think the end conclusion is valid though. As computation and connectivity take a bigger place in the economy, the value of the winners grows.

"Wintel" was more-or-less the only game in town for 15-20 years

And IBM has been around a long time ... it's just they're no longer the only game in town (though I'm a little surprises HP/HPE/MicroFocus/DXC wasn't in there)

I'm glad others picked up the lack of Oracle here. I am guessing by 'leading' the writer means leading household brands in the tech industry.

Also shouldn't Sun have been included, even at the height of Wintel Sun must have made some sort of financial impact, with Sparc servers and J2EE

Also, why ignore the Chinese tech giants?

I'm curious if it's due to a) American-Anglo-Euro centric world view or b) Chinese tech giants are arms of the State, as such hard to compare since they are financed by an authoritarian government.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com