While we “don’t do numbers” here at RedMonk, I come across many interesting numbers each week. Here are some:
Now, go start some companies
Following the recessionary drought of fundraising for venture funds in 2009, the amount raised has increased by 13 percent in the first quarter of 2010, with 72 funds raising $7.5 billion according to Dow Jones LP Source. For the same period last year, 68 funds raised $6.6 billion. Of course, this year’s raise is still half of what venture funds raised in 2008: a whopping $14.2 billion.
Mobile Web Use Up
A PewResearchCenter survey on the mobile habits of Americans shows a jump in the percentage of people who access the internet on their mobile phones. That percentage (38) is now greater than the number who play games (34). All “non-voice data applications”—from video recording to music playing—are up.
Also, Omar Gallaga hits up some of the digital divide results from the survey.
“Where’s my cut?”
Royal Pingdom reports Google had $209,624 in profit per employee in 2008, beating out Microsoft, Apple, Intel and IBM.
According to an ‘08 article from The Financial Times, Nintendo produced more than $1.6 million per employee—more than investment bank Goldman Sachs’ $1.24 million per employee during 2007.
Of course, the first comment makes me chuckle painfully:
Shows that Google’s decision to have basically zero customer service pays off in at least one metric.
See the full piece for even more and a fancy bar-chart. Via Bob Warfield.
NIMBY data-center consolidation
What NetApp found, probably to its dismay, is that while most federal IT professionals agree that more data center sharing among agencies is a good idea (76 percent), far fewer believe that it’s feasible for their particular agency to share resources with another (49 percent). It’s also the case that everyone knows that the other agencies don’t want to give up their own data centers, with 86 percent of the survey’s correspondents citing government culture as the number one obstacle to consolidation. In spite of the culture factor, 63 percent of those surveyed were confident that consolidation would happen eventually, but most (74 percent) were in agreement that the White House’s timetable is unrealistic.
…
While the government is contemplating shared facilities, maybe they could convince the NSA to share some of the $1.8 billion-dollar data center that the taxpayers are building in Utah. This one government data center, which is (as near as I could tell from reading the docs back in July of last year) exclusively for the NSA to use in its snooping operations. Note that the agency’s private data center, one of a number that it operates, costs two-thirds of what the DCCI is supposed to save the government over the next few years.
Open Source Adoption, 2010
In both the United States and the United Kingdom, respondents cited quality and improved reliability as the key benefits to open source programs. A total of 70% cited improved reliability, and 69% said they are finding better security and bug fixing.
Cost is a huge driver. Of the respondents, 71% said they believed they could save in software maintenance costs. They also cited savings in total cost of ownership and development costs.
Turning Sun Around
One of the ways Oracle is pushing profits is by slashing more employees from the Sun unit. In early June, Oracle told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it would be laying off more Sun employees, predominantly in Europe and Asia. Oracle’s original restructuring plan for Sun called for $325 million in restructuring costs (including an unspecified number of workforce reductions), but now the company says it will spend an additional $675 million to $825 million in costs, of which $550 million to $650 million would be for layoffs. So now the total bill for the Sun restructuring is between $1 billion and $1.15 billion. Oracle may be bragging about hiring 2,000 sales people and doubling the Sun direct sales force, but it is firing many, many times more people that this. My guess is that since the Oracle deal was announced last April, somewhere between 7,500 and 10,000 people have lost their jobs, including this round of layoffs. How it is possible for a public company to not divulge this information precisely is beyond me.
Ads in Twitter
Coca-Cola became the second company (following Disney/Pixar) to advertise as a Trending Topic on Twitter last week, garnering 86 million impressions and an engagement rate of 6% as a result.
“I don’t get no respect!”
At the conference later that day, I had a chance to engage in a spirited and mostly friendly discussion with some folks who thought we were doing a crap job all up. Stock price flat, no iPad, etc. Instead of shrugging and agreeing, I talked about our wins and our momentum. We’ve built a huge server business over the last decade, something else nobody has done. Windows 7 sales are up about 39 percent year over year, against a huge base. Office 2010 beta largest ever, Office is in the cloud. Bing is one year old, 4 points of market share–nobody has grown search market share against Google but we are doing it. They are copying our look, our home page. New Hotmail is driving them to offer something other than threaded email for Gmail. Xbox Live has 23 million users–again, only two companies in the last decade have built subscription services like this (Netflix is the other). Windows Azure has 10,000 paying customers, we just announced 700k deployment of live@edu, probably the largest cloud deployment in the world. Natal is coming, it’s cool. Yes, we want to (and will) do better in phones. Yes, we want to (and will) have more cool thin slate/tablet/other form factor devices that run Windows.
Disclosure: Microsoft is a client. See the RedMonk client list for other relevant clients.
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