COMMENTARY | Tech companies across the United States have been releasing their Q1 2012 financial reports, or their summaries of how well they did in the last few months. Apple, with its mountains of cash and nearly-vertical iPad sales growth (as illustrated in this graph by Benedict Evans.
It also had more cash on hand than the United States' federal government, as of last July. And with a total revenue of $127.84 billion for the last year, from Q2 2011 to Q1 2012, if Apple were a country with that much Gross Domestic Product (the market value of all goods and services produced in a country) it'd rank 57th out of 191 countries in the world, according to the CIA World Factbook.
Obviously, this isn't the most scientific way of figuring out how a hypothetical Apple-land would fit into world geopolitics. Nor are annual revenue and GDP necessarily the best measures to pair with each other; we may well be comparing Apples and oranges. It's still worth pondering, though. What if other tech companies were countries? Which ones would they be like?
Google: The United States of America
Google is big and good-natured, known for its cheap products and whimsical attitudes. Even after getting so huge, it's retained its can-do attitude and small start-up approaches to things.
The people who use Google's big-name products, like Google Maps and the Google search engine, often don't even know that competing products (like OpenStreetMap and DuckDuckGo) exist, and only have a peripheral awareness of how people in other software ecosystems live. Google's most strident fans, though, especially the ones who are users of its open-source Android operating system, think they know a lot about how things are in Europe -- I mean, on the iPhone -- and insist that what they have is better in every way.
Google has a habit of bullying smaller companies -- even in much smaller real-world countries -- but most users of its products are more or less nice people and don't even know what's going on.
Amazon: The People's Republic of China
Amazon is perfectly willing to strip-mine its own profits in order to gain market share ... as with its Kindle Fire e-reader tablet, which it's reportedly selling for less than it costs to make. Meanwhile, human rights watchdogs like the LA Times' Spenser Soper criticize the way that it treats its warehouse workers, even as its vast "exports" become indispensable to people the world over.
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