Scale of the true power of the company X

Timur Tatarshaov

I asked myself a question: what is true power of the company(in IT)? Basically what would take time X for company M and time X/10 for company Y with other things equal? Answer for sure is a people. Basically how fast would be able another company to implement same thing, that given company get done within a year, given a proper decision made?

To compare Microsoft has 118 000 people around the world. RedHat has 7300 people, what with some approximation means 118000/7300 ~ 16, in other words, if Microsoft will decide to implement thing that RedHat made and polished within 2 years for Microsoft if would take 1.5 months. Sure thing it’s not that simple but, it’s a good point for approximation to evaluate power of some companies. This assumption is really basic, it doesn’t cover, skills of the workers, processes inside the company, its flexibility and actual number of people in “production”, but could give some clue.

What’s interesting is a tendencies of the companies to hire of fire people. So here are some data about number of people in the global IT companies and their tendencies to grow or shrink.

Microsoft

Apple

Oracle

IBM

Red Hat