Have you ever wondered how much money the really big tech companies are making?

We have, so we looked at the money earned by 15 large, well-known tech companies to find out: Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and Yahoo.

To get some perspective, we looked at three things:

• Revenue
• Profit (net income)
• Assets

And because we couldn’t help but make this a bit of a competition, we picked a “winner” in each category. So, who will it be?

Highest revenue

How much money are these companies pulling in? Here is the revenue for these 15 tech companies during 2008.

As you can see, HP and IBM are in a league of their own here, distantly followed by Dell and Microsoft. We were quite surprised that Intel wasn’t higher on this list.

Winner: HP

(And boy would it be nice to have Pingdom on this list. When you start counting your revenue in billions, you know you’re BIG. Not that we’re complaining, but still… billions… )

Highest profit

While having a huge revenue is great, profit is what really counts in the long term.

Profit, or net income, is the money that’s left after subtracting costs and expenses from the total revenue. Here is the profit of these companies during 2008.

Note how different this list is from the revenue one, especially for one company: Microsoft. It has by far the highest profit of these companies.

Winner: Microsoft

Most assets

The total assets shown here include everything of value owned by these companies.

Just as with revenue, HP and IBM are in a league of their own here. Microsoft and Cisco are distant seconds.

Winner: HP

Final words

We’re not saying that this is a complete view of the financial situation of these companies (we’re definitely not accountants or financial analysts) but it’s still interesting to compare these numbers to get a feel for the kind of money that big tech companies are pushing around.

It also gives perspective. For example, judging by these numbers, Google is still a relatively small player when compared to veterans like IBM and even Microsoft. Of course, Google is 10 years old and IBM is over 100 years old, so the comparison isn’t exactly fair…

You might also want to check out our follow-up post about how many employees these companies have.

Data source: Google Finance

All the companies we included in this survey are publicly traded on NYSE/NASDAQ. Although Sun was recently bought by Oracle, we included it anyway.

Trailblazers, creatives and innovators have taken the Internet to where it is today and made it an essential part of our everyday lives. We have selected a number of interesting “firsts” from the history of the Internet (and the Web) for your reading pleasure.

Read more

Facebook has announced that it now has 400 million active users. Just one year ago Facebook had 150 million users, so 2009 was an incredible year for the social media giant.

There can be no doubt that Facebook is pretty much unstoppable at the moment, a real juggernaut. For some perspective on Facebook’s amazing growth, we have put together this infographic. We hope you’ll enjoy it!

Read more

Sometimes you want an easy way to share your Pingdom monitoring data with others. So far we’ve had public report pages that you can use, but now we’ve added one more sharing method that is very flexible and easy to use.

Enter our new “report banners”.

Read more

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you’ll know that last week Apple announced the iPad, its new tablet device. Reactions have been a mixed bag, and a storm of discussion has swept through the blogosphere about various features the iPad should or shouldn’t have had.

One of the main complaints so far has been the iPad’s lack of multitasking. (To be precise, multitasking is a bit of a misnomer here; the iPhone OS has multitasking. What people really mean is only allowing one app at a time to run.)

Read more

The tech industry is littered with billionaires. We all enjoy a good income, but some clearly have earned more than others. Much, much more. The question is, how much money do the really big names in tech actually have?

To find out, we went through the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest Americans, and filtered out the people who work within the tech field, or more specifically: IT.

So here they are, the 20 richest Americans in tech today.

Read more