Introduction
Corporations appeared with a difference of one year: Microsoft – April 4, 1975, and Apple – April 1, 1976. Almost from the moment of creation, there has been strong competition between the companies. This essay will compare and contrast the key moments of the development of two legendary companies, which largely predetermined the appearance of modernity, and their successes at the moment.
Founders
Harvard friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft. Apple was also founded by friends: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who were friends from school, and their colleague from Atari, Ronald Wayne, signed an agreement to jointly create the company (Moore & Tambini, 2018). However, the original composition of Apple, unlike the composition of Microsoft, lost one of the co-founders in the first month. Wayne went out of business after less than 2 weeks, selling his share to the co-founders for $800 to pay off his debts.
History
Apple immediately began to produce computers, and Microsoft started with making operating systems for IBM PC computers. Apple was the first to enter the IPO. In 1980, Steve Jobs earned $217 million on a public offering of the company’s shares – a record amount since 1956, when Ford went public (Moore & Tambini, 2018). Microsoft’s IPO took place in 1986 and brought the company more modest money – $ 61 million (Moore & Tambini, 2018). The development of the corporations on the market was very different.
In 1995, Bill Gates became the richest man in the world with a fortune of $12.9 billion, and in 1996 Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy and returned Steve Jobs to the board of directors, who made the company profitable again (Moore & Tambini, 2018). As a result, Apple focused on the mobile market – in 2007, the first iPhone was released, which revolutionized mobile devices (Moore & Tambini, 2018). In 2020, there were more than 1 billion iPhones in active use in the world. Microsoft’s prosperity is based on software – the number of active devices running on Windows 10 has reached 1.3 billion worldwide (Moore & Tambini, 2018). Moreover, corporations look different in the media space. Apple appears in the news more often: journalists write positive reviews about the company’s gadgets (Moore & Tambini, 2018). However, Apple often gets into the spotlight with antitrust proceedings and courts. Microsoft is less likely to get into the news feeds, avoiding showdowns with regulators, which other big tech corporations get into.
Hardware Differences
Apple’s own operating system has always been famous for its high level of stability. The ability of mac OS to hang is much more difficult than Windows. In the last two years, Apple has completely switched all its PCs to SoC, that is, systems on a chip of its own design (Moore & Tambini, 2018). Here, a central processor, a graphics processor, a machine learning module, cache memory and even RAM are assembled on one substrate. One of the main advantages of this approach is that since Apple makes both the device and the software at the same time, they interact with each other much more stable, reliable and efficient.
Microsoft does not have such a feature and it is not expected yet — the company inevitably has to optimize its system for a huge variety of other people’s chips (Intel, AMD and not only), correcting a lot of compatibility bugs in the process. However, Windows has a very well-implemented compatibility mode with older programs (Moore & Tambini, 2018). That is, even in a new system like Windows 11, without problems or with some insignificant restrictions, it is possible to run software not yet optimized for it, which is impossible with macOS.
Conclusion
Summing up, it can be noted that Apple attracts investors much more than Microsoft, despite the fact that the latter has a larger company size and continues to dominate the desktop market. Apple’s ability to create a special, new category of devices, like the iPhone and iPad, carries much more weight in the market than a steady stream of revenue from Microsoft’s already mature market.
Reference
Moore, M., & Tambini, D. (2018). Digital dominance: The power of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. Oxford University Press.