I recently wrestled with Word to produce shipping labels for a Kickstarter project’s rewards, and every step was painful, despite its built-in templates for Avery labels. Microsoft Word has always had mail merge, but it’s far more complicated than the last time I used it. It’s commonly used to generate form letters, address labels, and name tags. A concept dating back at least four decades, mail merge lets you insert placeholders in a template document that are replaced with entries in a column of data in a spreadsheet or similar tabular format. Apple removed the feature from the iWork suite as part of the fundamental rewrite of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote in 2013. #1615: Why Stage Manager needs an M1 iPad, Limit IP Address Tracking problems, Citibank cryptocurrency confusionĪfter nearly a decade, Apple has finally brought mail merge back to Pages.#1616: Explaining passkeys, Apple challenges for senior citizens, macOS 11.6.7 Big Sur fixes email attachment bug.#1617: Pages regains mail merge, HomeKit sensor improvements, keyboard flags in Monterey.Preview selections, portable power for a MacBook Pro #1618: M2 MacBook Air available to order, Lockdown Mode, Live Text vs.#1619: Stage Manager first impressions, Live Text in Preview redux, SMS 2FA failure fix, moving large folders with ChronoSync.3, 2000, what would you have ended up with in April 2011? Accounting for stock splits and, in Microsoft's case, dividends, but excluding taxes and broker's fees, you would have $2,072 from Microsoft stock and $13,294 from Apple stock.Īnd if you had invested $1,000 in each company on May 26 last year, your Apple stock would have been worth $1,427 in mid-April, compared with $1,033 for your Microsoft stock.īottom line: Apple has been by far the superior investment over the past decade. If you invested $1,000 in each company's stock on Jan. Investment value over time Source: Reuters, Yahoo Finance, Computerworld analysis However, Microsoft has maintained its enormous lead on the desktop. In another, tablets, it's getting crushed. Windows doesn't show up in that forecast.īottom line: In one high-growth area, smartphones, several influential analysts believe Microsoft will eventually come out on top. Gartner predicts Apple will keep a 69% share this year and will still have 47% by 2015.
In addition, Apple had a commanding 87.4% share of the worldwide tablet market last year, according to IDC. However, both Gartner and IDC predict Microsoft's Windows Phone will beat out Apple's iOS for mobile market share by 2015, with Gartner expecting a 19.5% share for Microsoft and 17.2% for Apple. Mac OS X's share has varied between just 3.5% and 4.0%.Īpple took a significant lead in the smartphone race, capturing 15.7% of the worldwide market last year, compared with just 4.2% for Microsoft. Market shareīeyond Wall Street, how do the companies stack up in the battle for tech users? Microsoft maintained an overwhelming lead in the desktop operating system business, keeping a roughly 92% share of the market from 2005 to 2009 (the last figures available from IDC). Investors were right last year, but only time can tell whether that outlook is still justified, given the company's high stock price. Microsoft's, meanwhile, has slipped from $219 billion to $212 billion.īottom line: Wall Street currently thinks more highly of Apple's growth potential and overall prospects than it does of Microsoft's. Since May 26, 2010, when Apple first inched ahead of Microsoft, Apple's market capitalization has risen from $223 billion to more than $306 billion (as of April 14).
While total values for Microsoft and Apple were close last spring, that's no longer the case.