Gartner put out an odd press release May 5 that said IBM
Count it as enterprise software sales instead I guess is what Gartner means.
But, based on the chart in the Gartner press release ranking IBM, Microsoft, Oracle (ORCL), SAP, Symantec (SYMN) and 'other,' Gartner is claiming that Microsoft sold about $30 billion in Windows and Office software to consumers. Sniff! Sniff! I don't think so.
Microsoft did about $62.5 billion total revenue in its FY 2010 so let's guess it did around $65 billion for CY 2010. (All this information is available to the penny quarter by quarter. I just haven't added it up recently.) Gartner is estimating that about $55 billion of the estimated $65 billion Microsoft revenue total is software revenue (with the other $10B in revenue being for support services, Microsoft Press, advertising, game hardware, I dunno).
But in its July 2010 10-K, Microsoft divides up its divisional revenue streams for FY 2010 as follows:
- Windows and Windows Live -- $18.5 billion, 80% of which goes through the OEM channel (Microsoft doesn't give an enterprise/consumer split of this OEM number in its 10-K; I have it in my notes somewhere but lets just say it's 50/50 for argument's sake; I actually think it's more enterprise than consumer)
- Server and Tools -- $15 billion, almost all of which presumably goes to enterprises
- Online -- $2 billion, almost all of which is probably counted as consumer; I could debate that but let's keep this blog post simple
- MBD -- $18.6 billion, 80% of which is to enterprises according to Microsoft
- Entertainment Device -- $8 billion, basically none of which comes from enterprises
Doing the math on the back of an envelope, I have Microsoft with $37.4 billion in enerprise sales (write me if I calculated wrong). Assuming the corporate-aggregate split of 90% software to 10% services, that would compute to about $34 billion in enterprise software sales, not the $24 billion implicitly claimed by Gartner. I think Microsoft is still number one by a mile.
But -- to save all this heavy math -- we could just turn the whole Gartner press-release approach on its head and ask
"Would IBM even make the top-four enterprise-software market share chart if Gartner didn't count IBM software locked into 30-year-old mainframe sales."
People are still paying a billion a year for CICS for chrissakes (or were a few years ago, the last time someone paid me to look into the subject).
-- Dennis Byron
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