Apple earned a massive profit of $419,528 per employee in the past 12 months. That beats Google, Microsoft, Intel and a bunch of other big tech companies by quite some margin.

One reason (of several) that profit per employee is such an interesting metric is because it gives you a number that doesn’t depend so much on the size of the company. In other words, it becomes easy to compare companies of different sizes.

We have calculated the yearly profit per employee for a selection of big tech companies that are publicly traded on NYSE and NASDAQ: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, eBay, Adobe, Yahoo, Oracle, IBM, Amazon, HP, Dell.

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Five years ago, Apple was a successful company with the iPod and its Mac line of computers. But it had not yet launched the iPhone. It had not yet launched the iPad. Back then, Apple’s yearly profit was $2.4 billion. In 2010 that number had risen to $16.6 billion. And in the first quarter of 2011, Apple has already made a $6 billion profit, well on its way to eclipsing previous years. It’s become a cash machine.

Apple is riding a wave of continuous success, and the stock market simply loves it. The value of the company has skyrocketed.

That’s the part we will take a closer look at in this article. How well has Apple done compared with other big tech companies in the last five years, i.e. 2011 compared to 2006, the year before Apple launched the iPhone?

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It’s finally happened. After a long reign at the top, Microsoft’s Windows XP is no longer the most widely used desktop operating system in the United States, instead turning the crown over to Windows 7.

As of April, Windows 7 has 31.71% of the desktop operating system market, compared to 31.56% for Windows XP.

Here is the current distribution of desktop operating systems in the United States, based on the first seven days of April.

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Pardon the wordplay on “dog-eat-dog world,” but as you’ll see it applies perfectly to what is going on with Windows in the desktop OS space.

Because there are several interesting things going on. Some quite expected, others not so much.

First of all, the situation now is that Windows 7 has made a real splash. It’s already passed Windows Vista and is getting closer and closer to that clunky old workhorse that refuses to die, Windows XP.

This is how the different versions of Windows were divided one year ago, versus now…

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The World Wide Web would be nothing without web servers, and Apache has been king of that hill for a long time now. Although its market share has been slipping a bit in recent years, Apache came back with a vengeance in 2010.

This became abundantly clear as we examined the growth of the top five web servers during the past year, from December 2009 to December 2010. As you’ll see, Apache really had a great year.

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Remember the recent discussion around Facebook’s “Face” trademark?

That whole discussion made us remember some rather funny or just plain strange examples of trademarks we’d seen from big players like IBM, Microsoft, Apple and Google in the past. Companies do love their trademarks…

Here are a few of the stranger ones.

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“What if Google does it?”

That has to be a pretty common question among startups when they discuss their business plans. Gaining Google as a sudden competitor is usually not good news.

The problem is, no matter how brilliant your software or service may be, there’s always a cloud on the horizon. There are elephants out there, the likes of Google, Microsoft, Apple, and now also Facebook, and those elephants can come crashing into your glass house at any time. All they need to do is release a similar product.

It happens all the time.

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Web developers fight a constant struggle: They want to use modern web browser features, but they also need to take browser adoption into consideration. If a large portion of their users run older versions of browsers, web developers will be limited in what they can accomplish.

With this in mind, we decided to find out how many people are running the latest version of their browser, whether it be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera.

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From its official launch in October 2009, it took Windows 7 only nine months to pass Vista. Now the next question is when it will catch up with Windows XP. Because, unbelievable as it may seem, Windows XP still has a massive 55% of the desktop OS market. That is more than Windows 7 and Vista combined.

To figure out when Windows 7 will overtake XP, we have made a prediction based on the average market share changes over the past six months. It will give us an idea of what will happen if things continue at their current pace.

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Microsoft just announced that it has sold 150 million copies of Windows 7, and that the OS is selling at a pace of seven per second. Not bad for an OS that was launched just eight months ago.

At that pace, Windows 7 will rapidly be gaining market share. So how is it doing compared to its older siblings, Windows Vista and Windows XP?

Here’s a graph showing how the overall market shares for these three operating systems have changed over the last 12 months.

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