Comments on: Microsoft vs. Infosys

By: truvalue

truvalue — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:39:42 +0000

many indians supporting indians and claims them as the top among the others in the world forgetting many things. this shows their unity and their clear strong defence. but fails to contribute creativity or development. as many supporters joins together they may win the argument.
a person who is a professional in that field only can tell what is what.
blind argument based on news or anything , any body(politicians) can be taken as their belief at that time, need not to have any value or knowledge.

By: Mahesh Mohan

Mahesh Mohan — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:13:35 +0000

Its becuase infosys is an IT Company and Microsoft is a Software company.

By: avdhesh

avdhesh — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 21:34:20 +0000

Hey..
Idea matters not number of employees..Google is perfect example..

By: Arun Sundar

Arun Sundar — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 15:00:17 +0000

Microsoft and Infosys are almost of the same age. But the difference lies in that MS is into products for mass markets while Infosys is a services company to verticals like banking, retail, insurance etc. Services obviously is more labour intensive as a result of which Infosys has more employees. MS definitely had a greater advantage of pro-innovation environment in the initial days while the best that Indian cos at the time was to give cost advantage to the western clients. This is the reason why MS grew as a product company while Infosys could not. But all the Indian top IT cos have started product deveopment and I surmise that the financial muscle, brand equity and domain expertise they have built in the last 4 decades will help them in this venture.

By: Diwaker Gupta

Diwaker Gupta — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 23:16:34 +0000

*@himanshu*: Relax dude, I never claimed I knew what I was talking about anyways. If you read the post carefully, you would have seen the following line:

“But what do all these numbers mean? Honestly, I don’t really know.”

I also don’t know what you mean by “stop talking big”. I’d appreciate if you’d be so kind as to elaborate a little more on that.

You also make it sound like you’re upset that I’m (wrongly) taking Infosys’s side. Thats just wrong on multiple levels man!

By: himanshu

himanshu — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 05:05:05 +0000

there can’t be any comparison between microsoft and infosys.since infosys is a kid or rather infant in front of microsoft’s global revenues. infosys stands no where to that figure. infosys is a major in providing services and comparison with microsoft(major product based company) is not appropriate. comparison should be made between infosys and TCS and you will see infosys has to do a lot to get at par with TCS. so stop talking big first go through the present status of infosys and then make a statement.

By: Diwaker Gupta

Diwaker Gupta — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 19:34:25 +0000

*@orgy*: I never said “Google is growing at 100% _because_ they are recruiting 100 people a week” — you made that connection yourself, and wrongly so. I made the remark about hiring 100 people a week just as anectodal evidence for Google’s really fast growth at that point in time. The fact that both number happened to be 100 (Google might as well have been hiring 80 or 120 person per week, with no change to my argument) was just a conincidence.

I already clarified in one of the comments above that this was not meant to be an apples to apples comparison. And yes, you can verify the growth rates (both in terms of revenue and size of the workforce) over the past 1 year from Yahoo Finance.

By: orgy

orgy — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 18:40:41 +0000

can u do a more crappy writeup on comparison where you dont even have an idea of the growth rate – “100% i believe for google.. bcoz they r recruiting 100 ppl a week”, “infosys has similar targets” – of 100% vs. 30%..? where did u get all these asumptions from? yahoo! finance?

By: Shashikant

Shashikant — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 17:37:26 +0000

Infosys earned $100 mn (sales) with 5000 employeess by end of 1999. Six years later they will be earning close to $2 bn with 50000 employees. This proves their ability to scale.

Infosys and Wipro have survived the departure of high-profile execs. Twice, in case of Wipro! They have also survived a market crash.

World’s software services market is in excess of $500 bn. (Top of the head number, may be off by $100 bn). India’s share is rediculously low. Ridiculous since we Indians like to market ourselves as world IT superpower. India’s pie can only increase.

TCS, Infosys and Wipro should be able to reach $10 bn (sales) mark by 2010.

By: Nakul

Nakul — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 19:06:26 +0000

Okay. When I meant investing in the company and not the shares, I meant – Look at how much money (through equity/share markets or debt) has been been invested into the company to generate profits.

When we use the word ‘invest’ in the common parlance, we are talking of one person buying the share from another at the market price. That does not contribute to the capital employed in the business in any way. It is an investment for the person buying the share and not a new investment for the company. That usage of the word ‘invest’ was what I was warning you against.

Hope that clarifies.

By: diwaker

diwaker — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 18:24:48 +0000

*@all*: this really wasn’t meant to be an apples to apples comparison of the two companies. I was just curious about the stats I saw and am trying to make some sense of the numbers.

*@david*: thanks for that insight — is this a well known trend in economics?

*@shashikant*: yeah, I should have mentioned the figure along with the date it was acquired. I just picked up the numbers from Infosys profile page on Yahoo. But I’m still curious to know the reason behind your confidence in the sustained growth of these companies. I’m not doubting that they won’t grow, I just want to know how? Given that they are targeting to manage the same amount of human and infrastructural resources as Microsoft, they presumably will face similar challenges?

*@yoav*: I guess that particular metric will project a slightly more acceptable growth rate for Google :-)

*@nakul*: how does one invest in a company without investing in the shares? I guess investing in shares is *one* way of investing in the company? I’m just not clear on the distinction there. I looked at the enterprise values for both INFY and MSFT as well — they seem to track the market capitalization quite closely.

By: Nakul

Nakul — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 16:58:40 +0000

Since you’ve thrust upon me the hat of being your ‘learned friend’, I must say something (though am not going to get into any numbers).

Well, for one, it’s not fair to compare revenue or profits per employee between between a services and a products company, as mentioned by David.

If at all, you want to compare the two companies based on profitability, you should be looking at Return on Capital Employed (ROCE) rather than revenue per employee. It tells me if I invested 100 bucks in each company (mind you, in the company; am not talking of investing in shares) at the beginning of this year, which of them gives me a better return on those 100 bucks, irrespective of which company employs more people or operates in which region or produces what.

Market Capitalization is a better measure to compare companies ‘cos it gives an idea of the valuation of the company’s owners. The future projected growth rates are also taken into account in that valuation. IMO, a still better measure to compare companies (and not its owners) is Enterprize value which is arrived at by adding the market value of the company’s debt to the market capitalization.

By: Yoav Shapira

Yoav Shapira — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 13:49:24 +0000

At B-school they teach us to look at revenue per employee as a measure of corporate success, and moreover at that number (revenue per employee) over time as the company grows as a measure of management competence. Supposedly, good management will lead to increasing revenues at least as far as increasing manpower.

By: Shashikant

Shashikant — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 12:46:54 +0000

Minor correction – Infosys’ employee strength is 49,422 as of 31st Dec 05.

Comparison of Infosys and Microsoft is unfair. Infosys works on minor components of Microsoft’s products. The product and services are different ball game altogether. A better, not exactly fair, comparison would be IBM Global Services (Revenue $44B), EDS, and the likes.

Infosys, Wipro and TCS can sustain their current growth rates of 30% pa since they are still small players compared to Big Brother in the game. I believe they have capability to manage scale. The bigger problem they will face is quality workers. Already, all those who can spell “java” have got jobs.

By: David N. Welton

David N. Welton — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 10:04:42 +0000

My impression was that Infosys was more of a services company rather, whereas Microsoft is very much a products company with several monopolies or near monopolies. Service companies scale more or less linearly – you incur more expenses as you add people.