Apple vs. Google: By the Numbers

Apple and Google make excellent rivals because they conduct business in such different ways. One company is known for its finely polished “never-in-beta” product releases and its cult of secrecy, while the other is known for pushing out experimental “perpetually-in-beta” products and its extreme openness.

So it shouldn’t surprise you that when we compare Apple and Google by the numbers, they’re pretty different. We took a look at the stats of these two juggernauts and discovered that they rarely overlap–here’s the breakdown.

Apple hit a milestone last August when it became the world’s most valuable company, briefly exceeding the market cap of Exxon. Google is not even close.

[Source: Yahoo Finance]

Apple employs nearly twice as many full-time employees as Google, but most of them are employees in Apple’s retail stores (36,000). Subtract the Apple Store, and Google is larger.

[Source: Apple and Google SEC filings]

If corporations are people, Apple is 34 years old–old enough to be 13-year-old Google’s mother. But in recent years, the relationship between these two companies has been anything but familial.

A testament to the rise of personal technology (and inflation), Google’s opening stock price in 2004 was nearly four times that of Apple in 1977.

[Sources: Apple Inc. By Jason O’Grady, CNN Money]

Although Apple is a more valuable company than Google, a single share of Google stock is worth almost twice as much as one share of Apple’s. (Not that being an early investor in either would have been a bad idea.)

[Source: Yahoo Finance]

Although Apple and Google have four operating systems between them, only three are thriving. Google’s young Chrome OS may be ahead of (or behind) its time.

Apple’s campus is a little bigger than the Googleplex now, but the Apple Campus 2–a spaceship-like structure on a 150-acre plot–will be larger than the Pentagon.

[Sources: Kier & Wright, PC Mag]

Three months into his new role as CEO of Apple, Tim Cook’s net worth is unclear, but Steve Jobs was worth an estimated $7 billion before he passed away in October, and much of that was from his stake in Pixar. Larry Page is much wealthier, even though his company isn’t as valuable.

[Sources: Forbes (Jobs, Page)]

Tim Cook is not a $1 salary CEO, unlike his predecessor Steve Jobs and unlike Larry Page. Cook’s base salary was $800,000 in 2010, and may be more now. That doesn’t include bonuses on stock options, including the $384 million stock grant Cook gets if he stays with Apple for a decade.

[Sources: Computerworld, Forbes]

The head of Apple is much older than the head of Google, but that wasn’t always the case; Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and the late Steve Jobs were born only two months apart.

Apple’s troubled years without Steve Jobs in the late 1980s and 1990s helped rack up the company’s total number of CEOs. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin brought on Eric Schmidt for “adult supervision,” Schmidt later joked.

Ronald Wayne quit Apple and gave back his stock less than two weeks after co-founding the company. D’oh.

These numbers, from October, show Google gaining on Apple. In June, Apple had 200 million activated iOS devices compared to 100 million Android devices for Google in May. Apple, however, is way ahead–if you only count tablets.

[Sources: Apple, Seeking Alpha]

Given the hype surrounding Apple products–and the importance of eating apples–you’d think Apple would have more search results, but the comparison with results for Google isn’t even close. To be fair, Google is a search engine.

Apple has only tried social networking once, and that didn’t work out too well (does anyone even remember Ping?). Google has built/acquired six social networks, and though most of them failed it’s finally getting some traction with Google+.

Not sure what’s a bigger surprise: that Orkut is still around–and actually quite popular in Brazil–or that Apple hasn’t scrapped Ping yet.

Operating dozens of Web-based services, as Google does, means keeping users up to date on every little tweak. Meanwhile, Apple’s communiques are so rare that a list of press releases suffices. (Apple’s “hot news” section is sort of a blog, but not really.)

Fun fact: Google has more followers on Twitter than it does on Google+, where only 81,777 people have the company in their circles. Less surprising: Apple’s not on Google+, either.