If you look at the future I still think Google is the company with the brightest future for one reason :
Almost all of their revenue is recurring. You have to keep paying to get your ads to show up. And they are in a market that is still growing a lot ( internet and cellphones).
Microsoft's revenue is mostly recuring but only because so far they have managed to convince customers to purchase new versions of OS or office products which lets be honest are not huge upgrades compared to the previous versions. And as the PC market shrinks their potential market shrinks too...
The huge majority of Apple's revenue is hardware, and that revenue will keep climbing until they reach market saturation but once this is done the revenue will not keep recuring ( because at some point people will realize there isn't such a huge benefit in upgrading their phone every year ( and the more apps they download the more of a pain it is when you get a new phone and have to redownload all those apps). So at some point their revenue will stop growing like crazy and most likely slow down ( the way the Ipod sales have started declining).
As market saturates and competition intensifies Apple will not be able to keep makign such huge margins on its products either...
Still short term Apple is the company where the sky is the limit but if you had to bet about which of the 3 companies would be doing the best 11 years from now, my money would be on Google, not Apple....
So if I had to rank those companies in terms of growth :
3 years time frame :
Apple > Google > Microsoft
10 years :
Goggle > Apple = Microsoft
PS : I own Google stock so I might be biaised...
PS3-Xbox360 gap : 1.5 millions and going up in PS3 favor !
PS3-Wii gap : 20 millions and going down !
