Last week we posted an article about how much money the large tech companies are making, but another really interesting thing to look at is how large their workforce is. Just as with revenues and profits, these numbers can be quite surprising (and impressive).

We used the same group of 15 well-known tech companies that we looked at last week: Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and Yahoo.

There are big companies, and there are HUGE companies

No one will deny that Microsoft and Intel are big companies, but just look at HP and IBM. The sheer size of their workforces make the other companies look like small startups. IBM has almost 400k employees! Its HR and accounting departments must have their hands full…

To put the size of the IBM workforce in perspective: IBM has more employees than Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Cisco, Apple, Amazon and Google all put together.

Some other observations:

• Google and Amazon are almost exactly the same size in terms of employees.
• Microsoft has close to three times as many employees as Apple.
• IBM has almost 20 times as many employees as Google (or Amazon).
• HP has more than four times as many employees as Dell.

If you haven’t already, you might want to check out last week’s post about the money these companies pull in.

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.

Do you live in a country that loves Apple’s iPad? Most of us probably think we do, but we wanted to be able to tell you for sure. So even though we have written about the iPad many times before, it’s now time for us to tackle this hotly contested topic again.

Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.

Perhaps you live in one of them.

Read more

Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.

This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.

Read more

The juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social network is growing at a rapid pace overall.

But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.

In fact, in one country, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another country, Facebook has gained almost 17 million users over the same period.

What countries are we talking about, you ask? Read on and we’ll tell you.

Read more

Developers who want a portable computer to code on, which is thin, light, sleek and yet powerful, may now be getting another option in an ultrabook from Dell. What makes the “Sputnik” ultrabook different is that it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Linux and it’s tailor-made for developers.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, security, and other geeky topics.

Read more

“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day.

This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.

Read more