Apple becomes more profitable than Microsoft

It seems that Apple has finally become more profitable than Microsoft. It was just a year ago when Apple passed Microsoft in terms of market cap while six months later they overtook Microsoft in terms of revenue. With today’s release of Microsoft’s Q3 2011 results, Apple has now passed Microsoft on profits too.

Despite this, Microsoft’s results were still good, with a record third-quarter revenue of $16.43 billion and with a net incoming at $5.23 billion, though this falls well short of Apple’s $5.99 billion last quarter.

The company did say that "Windows 7 remains the fastest selling operating system in history with 350 million licenses sold," despite failing to mention that their Windows and Windows Live division have seen revenues fall from last year from $4.65 billion to $4.445 billion this year

In the companies earnings release, Microsoft also showed that their Entertainment and Devices Division has been growing 60% year-over-year thanks to excellent sales of Kinect for Xbox 360 and good on-going sales of the console itself. The earnings release failed to state anything about Windows Phone 7 sales however.

"We delivered strong third quarter revenue from our business customers, driven by outstanding performance from Windows Server, SQL database, SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and increasingly our cloud services," said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft.

"Office had another huge quarter, again exceeding everyone's expectations, and the addition of Office 365 will make our cloud productivity solutions even more compelling. We continue to see strong adoption of our cloud-based services among the Fortune 500."

Times have changed for Microsoft though, with Apple’s market cap now standing at nearly $100 billion dollars higher than the Seattle based company. Sales of PC’s have been slower than Microsoft would have hoped, while Apple has seen both iPad and Mac sales increase year after year.

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