While it’s hardly surprising anymore to hear about how much money Apple has (hint: it’s more than the GDP of most countries), one fact puts it into perspective: Apple’s worth more than Google and Microsoft combined.

I am an ignoramus when it comes to the stock market, but I can at least add this much.

Apple’s market capitalization: $459.66 billion.
Google’s market capitalization: $199.03 billion.
Microsoft’s market capitalization: $256.10 billion.

Granted, Apple is “only” worth $4.53 billion more than the combined financial worth of Google and Microsoft, but that’s still enough money for them to get into the interplanetary real estate market. But let’s arbitrarily compare Apple’s value to lots of other things that are worth a lot of money:

Budget of NASA: $17.8 million
GDP of Romania: $161.62 billion
GDP of South Africa: $275.5 billion
Total military budget of U.S.: $683.7 billion

Actually, that’s all of the expensive stuff I can think of. At any rate, you get the picture. Apple is ridiculously wealthy.

The company also stated it had a net less of $275 million for 2011, compared to $413 million last year.

One explanation for the financial results of Groupon’s 2011 is its effort to expand into other areas of commercse as well as other regions of the world. These efforts were evinced with their sales, which increased %500 to $1.6 billion.

The financial impact of the report sent Groupon shares up as high as $25.70 earlier today before falling back down to $24.58 by the end of the day. Still, despite the tumble after initially rising, shares are still up $0.39 for the day.

The full statement of Groupon’s 2010 fiscal earnings as well as their first quarterly results can be accessed on their website.

Incredimail’s shares plummeted by 45 percentage points hitting this year’s lowest figure of $2.50. IncrediMail, specializes in producing customized e-mail solutions.

Picture Credits: Reuters

In a statement issued by the Incredimail it specified that its AdSense account has been scrapped. The association with Google had been quite profitable for them in the years 2006 and 2007. IncrediMail’s also stated that it is considering talks with the Google for further clarifications, discussions and negotiations in addition to approaching other vendors as an alternative.

Incredimail’s stocks have picked up a bit and had reached to a high of $2.70 in the morning. One lesson that’s become crystal clear from this episode is that if you put all your eggs in one basket, be ready for incurring some surprisingly hefty losses.

Via: Reuters

Comments

Despite the millions of search and ad revenue dollars coming from Google’s pockets, Baker told ComputerWorld Mozilla could back away from the deal willingly, if it were to jeopardize their community.

“We’ve spent a lot of time and energy making sure that Google understands that it cannot turn us into an arm of Google,” Baker said in the report.

“There are other ways to make money from a browser,” she continued. “We could have a more diverse revenue stream. The key is to find business models, or I should say revenue models, that help get things done. Search is a great example, but it’s not the only example.”

If Baker can find a suitable replacement revenue stream for Google, she should pursue it. That would alleviate the extra time and energy Mozilla spends on keeping Google at arm’s length.

$61.5 million would take some skillful effort to replace. If Baker could pull that off for Mozilla, she should receive every Executive of the Year award that exists.

Why do vendors like Sun, IBM (officially now), Google, etc. support OO.o? Well, providing customer choice and openness are two of the key reasons quoted. These are definitely great reasons that we all want to see OO.o succeed.

Most vendors backing OO.o compete with Microsoft in markets other than Office Productivity software. So, what about the competitive benefits for vendors supporting OO.o? Let’s face it, $1 diverted from MS Office could become $0.70 diverted from the budgets of Microsoft’s other business units.

Here’s a look at Microsoft’s 2006 FY financials by reporting division:

- MS Office is inside of “Information Worker”

- MS Windows Client operating systems are inside of “Client”

- MS Windows Server operating systems are inside of “Server & Tools”

- MS SQL Server is inside of “Server & Tools”

- MS Ad revenue is inside of “MSN”

When you look at the operating margins of Microsoft’s business units, it’s quite easy to see why attacking MS Windows profits with Linux and MS Office profits with OO.o is the strategy of choice for vendors that compete with MS in other markets.

PS: I should state: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.”

Comments

Tag:

I do think there is a balance between the time you invest in blogging and content development, and making a living.

When I look at SEOmoz, I see a CEO, and a company, committed to reputation building through offering a wealth of free information offered up with nothing asked for in return. I know of no one who has shared more about their company. Reference SEOmoz’s sharing of it’s 2006 financials (in detail) and more data, such as this post: More SEOmoz stats than you can shake a stick at.

This level of openness builds an enormous amount of trust, and deservedly so. I can tell you from my personal experience that this openness is something that is quite evident when dealing with Rand in person.

Ultimately, that reputation and trust should help SEOmoz build up its premium subscriber base, and, it’s ability to get high value clients. But speaking for myself, I can tell you that I don’t regret a single penny that SEOmoz makes, and I was personally dissappointed that SEOmoz did not make more than they reported in 2006.

So now, the other side of the coin. Lack of disclosure and lack of openness builds mistrust. You become unsure about how to value the information you are receiving. You get uncomfortable with a person when you know they are not telling you something. This is not somewhere you want to be in this social web of ours.

The social web is far too efficient at spreading this type of reputation and trust information around. And, it gets more efficient every day, so this trend is going to continue for the forseeable future. In other words, the genie is out of the bottle, and has no intention of going back in.

So I agree wholeheartedly with Rand’s positioning that bloggers should be open about how they are being compensated (saying “I’m getting paid”, for example, is enough detail), and that readers deserve that, but I also think that it’s in the blogger’s self interest to be open. There is a BIG difference (should I say vast ocean?) between being paid to write a review, and getting compensated for your efforts in the way that SEOmoz does.

FYI – all of the content development efforts of STC are uncompensated (in the direct sense). This includes answering questions in comments, and in emails I receive from people, without there ever being a chance of getting a penny out of it. I really enjoy doing it (that’s compensation too!), and we do have companies that have become clients as a result of our efforts.

Comments

Google By Numbers; Profits Flatten Out

That net income is a little less than that of fourth quarter 2006, which reached $1.03 billion. But at press time in after hours trading, investors pushed shares of Google to $484.62, up nearly $13 since market close.

CEO Eric Schmidt also took the vacant chairman’s seat, giving him both top titles in the executive hierarchy at Google. He has a cash and equivalents pile of nearly $12 billion to play with, the DoubleClick $3.1 billion bid notwithstanding.

Google has been truly impressive with the growth of its international business. The company said in its earnings announcement that 47 percent of total revenues came from international sources, accounting for $1.71 billion.

“The global growth of our core search and ads business and our focus on building our partnerships drove our strong results in the quarter,” said Schmidt. “We continued to expand our worldwide footprint, adding important new partners and growing our platform to increase our ability to deliver targeted and measurable ads.”

Through AdSense on partner sites, Google pulled in 37 percent of its revenue, $1.35 billion. Google paid $1.05 billion of that back to AdSense partners, and that figure made up the bulk of Google’s $1.13 billion in Traffic Acquisition Costs.

Expansion of its partner network remains a key strategic initiative for Google. As for its Clear Channel and EchoStar deals, co-founder Sergey Brin said on the conference call these deals are for prime ad inventory, not remnant.

That sharp whistling sound was that of Red Hat shares dropping in after-hours trading and continuing to plunge when the market opened after the company announced a serious dip in its earnings.

The stock closed at 26.32 before Red Hat revealed its financials on September 26th. Investors did not take the news well, despite revenue growth of 52 percent:

Investors may be taking a harder look at the company’s free cash flow. They may be looking at it too hard, according to comments from a company executive:

Despite Red Hat’s JBoss acquisition providing $7 million in revenue, that $350 million purchase could be part of the disappointing earnings side, MarketWatch reported:

Red Hat is taking the numbers in stride. Said Peters, “Revenue grew nicely and we expect the recent introduction of the Red Hat Application Stack will help continue that trend. We expect operating results and cash flow will improve in the second half of fiscal 2007 since much of the heavy integration work is behind us already.”

—
Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

I’ve ordered the Oracle 11i e-Business Suite Essentials for Implementers Self-Study CD Course which is designed for the first exam (Exam #1Z0-200) in the Financials certification track. The course consists of two CD-ROM’s produced by Thomson Netg and wanted to let you know my first impressions of the course material.

I have to say that I’m quite impressed with the training material. Unfortunately, I don’t have any other material of a similar nature (from an Oracle perspective) to compare it with. However, I’ve found it to be a very good introduction to the high level concepts relating to implementation. In particular, although I’ve been implementing Oracle E-Business Suite for about 5 years now I’ve pretty much stuck to the functional side of things and I found that this provides you with a good understanding of the technical architecture and concepts. Course Topics are as follows:

Oracle 11i e-Business Suite Essentials for Implementers Part 1

Oracle 11i Architecture

Shared Entities and Integration Points

Multi-Org Fundamentals

Oracle 11i System Administration

Oracle 11i e-Business Suite Essentials for Implementers Part 2

Flexfields Fundamentals

Workflow Fundamentals

Alerts Fundamentals

At the end of each course topic there are self assessment questions which are helpful in determining whether you’ve learnt enough to be ready for the exam. I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending this CD based learning to anyone who wants to learn more about Oracle Financials. If you would like to ask me any further questions about the content please add your comments. BTW, I’m not prepared to burn copies of the CD for anyone so please don’t ask!!

DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Richard Byrom is the founder and author of OracleAppsBlog, which documents the daily experiences and learnings of Oracle Applications Consultants and Implementors. He is also an Oracle Applications Consultant, Speaker and Author.

I’ve been commuting quite a lot recently so stacked up these podcasts on my mp3 player and had a listen. I have to say I’m quite pleased with the offering. According to the Oracle site:

Oracle AppCasts are online audio interviews with Oracle customers, partners, product and industry experts, delivered via RSS podcasting or on your computer at www.oracle.com/appcasts.

A listing of what’s available to listen to now:

• Podcast: A Customer’s Experience Using Oracle DBI
• Podcast: An Explanation of Oracle’s Lifetime Support Policy for All Application Products
• Podcast: BPEL Technology: Apps-to-Apps Integration Using Oracle EBS Financials & Oracle’s Retail Industry Solution
• Podcast: How Automating the Enterprise Risk Management Process Helps Organizations Comply with Regulations
• Podcast: Oracle and BearingPoint Bring Value to Professional Services Customers
• Podcast: Oracle’s Applications Solution Centers Provide Value to Higher Education Customers
• Podcast: Performance and Tuning Improvements in Oracle’s E-Business Suite
• Podcast: Realize the Benefits of Oracle Fusion Architecture Today – Get On the Path to Oracle Fusion Applications
• Podcast: Reducing Compliance and Security Costs With JD Edwards World Solutions
• Podcast: Transforming Government with ERP Solutions

Richard Byrom is the founder and author of OracleAppsBlog, which documents the daily experiences and learnings of Oracle Applications Consultants and Implementors. He is also an Oracle Applications Consultant, Speaker and Author.