Which of them was supposed to be overpriced, again?

[learnedax]

Not to say there aren't issues of scale, etc. that should be borne in mind, but an interesting comparison nonetheless:
Apple makes ~3% profit on their revenue.
Microsoft makes ~30% profit on their revenue.

Comments

[snarkyman.livejournal.com]

So what do Dell's profits look like? Sun Microsystems?

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Sun's profits? You're a little behind the times, I guess? :-P

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Well, Sun is making an overall net of ~26% (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040720/sftu092_1.html), with a gross margin of 39.4%, as compared with Apple's 27.8%. Dell ran extremely tight and profitable this year, resulting in a net of ~6.5% (http://www.computerworld.com/news/2004/story/0,11280,90165,00.html) from their gross margin of 18.2% (http://www.twice.com/article/CA385582.html?display=Business+News).

So within the PC hardware domain, Apple could be doing better, though Dell is pretty sharply outstripping almost everyone in the industry with its economies of scale at this point.

My point was more that, for any domain, Microsoft is unreasonably overpriced. Their not just running a very tight operation; they've got a gross margin of 81% (http://cbs.marketwatch.com/tools/quotes/profile.asp?sid=3140&siteid=google&symb=MSFT). The software industry, being a non-industrial market, tends to have significantly higher margins, but that is probably about the highest within the already high market.

[tpau]

so, what you are saying is that the much cheaper PCs can be even cheaper, thus outselling macs forever based on price alone??