| 14.7m workers in Microsoft ecosystem |
|
| by Stephen Withers | |
| Friday, 19 October 2007 | |
  
Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
The problem is that this lumps together productive and unproductive jobs. If your goal was to maximise the number of people employed, it would make sense to produce software that leads to a large number of help desk calls. After all, the number of programmers needed remains the same whether their work is used by 100 people or 100 million, but generally speaking the support calls will grow with the number of users. You can't help wondering how things would be different if Microsoft wasn't there. It is tempting to suggest that having such a dominant operating system vendor does mean there's a big market for companies that want to create software or provide services. But if you waved a magic wand and replaced all those copies of Windows with Linux or Mac OS X or Solaris, wouldn't the demand for applications be the same? And wouldn't each of the software companies need an accountant and a sales director and so on? We'll leave to our readers the question of whether more or fewer system administrators, help desk jockeys and other support staff would be needed in a Microsoft-free world. Another interesting finding was the way the ratio of Microsoft revenue to other companies' revenue varies among regions. On a worldwide basis, the figure is 1:7.79, but that masks considerable variation. In North America and Western Europe, the multipliers are 6.14 and 7.68. Elsewhere, other ecosystem companies take a bigger share of the pot. One possibility is that attitudes towards using unlicensed software vary according to its source: perhaps it is considered bad form to use a local company's software without paying for it, whereas big foreign companies - and they don't come much bigger than Microsoft - are fair game. Another possibility is that some countries' indigenous IT firms may serve export markets that are far larger than their local customer base. This could explain why other companies in central and eastern Europe bring in over $14 for every $1 of Microsoft revenue. Footnote: The IDC study was sponsored by Microsoft. |
Tags
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
