Have you ever wondered how much money Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Yahoo, Amazon and other tech giants have in the bank? What kind of assets do they have, how much spending money do they have? The vague answer is, “a lot.” But if you want to find out exactly how much, read on.

To answer these questions, we picked out 15 well-known tech companies and looked at two things:

• Total assets: The value of all assets of a company, including equipment, properties, offices, cash, etc. In short: “everything they own.”
• War chest: The part of a company’s assets that consists of either cash and equivalents, or short term investments that can be quickly converted to cash. In short: “spending money.”

Here are the companies we included: Cisco, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle, IBM, Intel, HP, Dell, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, AMD, Adobe, and Novell.

On to the facts

Let’s go straight to the numbers. The chart here below is sorted by the size of each company’s war chest:

Observations and comparisons, giant vs. giant

It’s quite interesting to look at these numbers because they give you an idea of the massive amounts of money and resources these companies have access to, and how they compare amongst each other.

So here are some mixed observations and comparisons based on the data we collected.

• In terms of total assets, IBM and HP make the other companies look small.
• Microsoft has twice the assets of Google.
• Google has twice the assets of eBay and more than twice the assets of Yahoo.
• Google’s and Apple’s war chests are almost exactly the same size, just under 25 billion USD. However, these numbers are from the end of 2009, before Google went on its recent shopping spree.
• The only company of the 15 we included with a bigger war chest than Microsoft is Cisco, the networking giant.
• Comparing AMD and Intel is like comparing David and Goliat, at least in terms of assets. Intel has almost six times the assets of AMD.
• Oracle, Apple and Intel have almost exactly the same amount of total assets, just over 53 billion USD.
• Companies that can quickly convert more than half of their total assets to cash: Cisco, Google, and Novell.

You know you’re looking at big players when the smallest company on the list “only” has 1.8 billion USD in assets.

Final words

Having access to large amounts of cash is of course hugely beneficial to these companies. It allows them to acquire and invest in other companies and technologies, spend money on big advertising campaigns and also have a buffer against leaner times when their revenues might be suffering. In times of financial crisis, the “war chest” will be, pardon the pun, a real asset.

Disclaimer: Keep in mind that we here at Pingdom are tech guys, not financial analysts.

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