If you were impressed with Google’s successful financial quarter, consider this: their much-ballyhooed competition with Microsoft ends at the balance sheet, as Redmond’s juggernaut pulls in as much quarterly revenue as Google will do this year.
Yeah, they do. For their first financial quarter, Microsoft absorbed $10.81 billion in revenue, beating the year over year quarter by eleven percent.
Net income also jumped to 35 cents per share, or $3.48 billion, for the quarter. “The solid revenue results for the quarter were at the top end of our expectations and represent a very good start to the fiscal year,” said Chris Liddell, chief financial officer at Microsoft.
Google had $6.1 billion in revenue for all of 2005. They are on track for $9.3 billion in 2006. Yet it’s shares of GOOG that have money madman Jim Cramer shrieking that Google is the value buy, and they’re well on the way to $560 per share.
Microsoft has been staring more than three years of stock price flatness in the face. “Investors Unimpressed With Microsoft,” Forbes sniffed over its morning oatmeal. At press time, shares of Microsoft priced at 28.66, nearly a twentieth of Cramer’s “lowball price target” for Google.
Vista and Office 2007 haven’t even launched in the consumer marketplace yet, and there are rumblings that Vista could be delayed yet again. It has been delayed numerous times, but even with that in mind, Microsoft pulled in more revenue and made more money in a single quarter than Google is projected to make for 2006.
It’s just a little too soon to dismiss Microsoft in the imagined battle against Google for computing supremacy. One downturn in paid search advertising, one innovation in search technology, and Google could be out of the fight faster than a palooka taking a first-round dive.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
