Sam R. Hall

John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame has an interesting post that looks at the leadership styles of Apple’s Steve Jobs versus Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer

Now before you skip right over this post and ignore going to his site all together, let me say that it truly is interestin for even those folks who are not interested in the business client of the tech world.

Gruber starts it off this way:

Apple and Microsoft, as ever, offer a study in contrasts. Take, for example, two recent company-wide memos from CEOs Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer. Jobs’s, leaked last week, regarded the botched launch of MobileMe. Ballmer’s, from two weeks ago, outlined Microsoft’s strategic goals for the next year.

I’m not going to rehash his post. You should read it for yourself.

The only piece I wanted to point out what Gruber’s numbers on revenue and profit for Apple, Microsoft and Google. They are, by Gruber’s account:

• Apple: $7.4B in revenue, $1B in net profit
• Microsoft: $15.8B in revenue, $4.3B in profit
• Google: $5.4B in revenue, $1.2B in profit

If you take those numbers and boil them down to profit margins, here’s how the companies rank:

1. Microsoft: 27.2 percent profit margin
2. Google: 22.2 percent profit margin
3. Apple: 13.5 percent profit margin

Going by those numbers, Microsoft is twice as profitable as Apple. I guess you can invest in Microsoft to make twice as much as Apple, then buy an Apple product and boost their bottom line.