Microsoft vs Apple

In January 1975, Paul Allen showed Bill Gates an issue of Popular Electronics featuring the Altair 8800. Neither of them had written a BASIC interpreter for it. But Gates called MITS and told them Microsoft had a working version ready. They then had eight weeks to actually build it. It worked. Gates was 19.

IBM approached Microsoft in 1980 to write an operating system for its new PC. Microsoft didn't have one. Gates bought QDOS from a Seattle programmer for $50,000, renamed it MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM — while retaining the right to license it to other manufacturers. IBM thought hardware was the business. Gates understood it was software. The decision made Microsoft the most powerful company in computing for the next two decades.

When Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014, Microsoft was widely regarded as a company that had missed mobile, missed search, and missed social. Nadella pivoted to cloud computing, transformed Microsoft's culture from internal competition to growth mindset, and repositioned Azure as the foundation of the enterprise. The market cap tripled in his first five years. The transformation is studied in business schools as one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in history.

Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI in January 2023, securing exclusive access to GPT-4. Within months, "Copilot" had been embedded in Word, Excel, Teams, GitHub, and Bing — repositioning Microsoft as the leading AI company in enterprise software. By early 2025, Microsoft's AI business had crossed $13 billion in annualised revenue, growing 175% year-over-year.

By Q3 fiscal 2026, Microsoft's AI business had surpassed $37 billion in annualised revenue — growing 123% year-over-year. Azure revenue grew 40%. Microsoft 365 Copilot had over 20 million paid seats, with the number of enterprise customers deploying more than 50,000 seats having quadrupled year-over-year. Cloud revenue crossed $50 billion in a single quarter. Microsoft had extended its OpenAI partnership, securing a 27% stake in the company and cementing its position as the most important distribution partner for large language models in enterprise software.

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer on April 1, 1976, in the garage of Jobs' childhood home in Los Altos, California. Wozniak had designed the Apple I — a bare circuit board with no keyboard, case, or display — and Jobs saw the commercial potential. Wayne, who co-signed the founding documents, sold his 10% stake back for $800 just twelve days later. That stake would eventually be worth over $700 billion.

After a boardroom power struggle with CEO John Sculley — a man Jobs himself had recruited from Pepsi with the now-famous line "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" — Jobs was stripped of his duties and left Apple in September 1985. He founded NeXT and later acquired Pixar for $10 million. Both decisions would prove transformative.

By 1997, Apple was burning through cash at a catastrophic rate and was reportedly 90 days from insolvency. In a move that stunned the industry, Apple acquired NeXT for $429 million — and brought Steve Jobs back. At Macworld that year, Bill Gates appeared on screen via satellite to announce Microsoft's $150 million investment in Apple. The crowd booed. But the cheque cleared.

On January 9, 2007, Jobs announced that Apple was reinventing the phone. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer publicly dismissed it: "There's no chance the iPhone is going to get any significant market share." He was wrong. The iPhone became the most profitable consumer product in history, generating over $1 trillion in cumulative revenue and establishing Apple as the defining technology company of the 21st century.

On August 2, 2018, Apple became the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalisation. It then crossed $2 trillion in 2020, $3 trillion in 2022, and by mid-2026 had reached $4.36 trillion — a figure larger than the GDP of Germany. The Services segment, which includes the App Store, iCloud, and Apple Music, now generates over $100 billion annually and commands margins that rival the most profitable software companies on earth.

After years of criticism for lagging behind in AI, Apple launched Apple Intelligence across its device ecosystem in 2025 and 2026, partnering with Google to integrate Gemini directly into Siri. The strategy — on-device AI with a privacy-first model, rather than massive cloud infrastructure buildout — proved controversial but financially vindicated. Q1 fiscal 2026 revenue hit a record $143.8 billion, up 16% year-over-year, with iPhone sales surging 23%. Apple had shifted 25% of iPhone production to India to reduce geopolitical risk, and analysts at Wedbush were calling the upcoming iPhone 18 cycle a generational buying opportunity.