Identifying the Major Software Companies

Who are the largest publicly traded software companies?

I searched the Technology section of Yahoo! Finance and selected the twenty largest companies, by market capitalization, across four categories: Application Software, Multimedia & Graphics Software, Security Software & Services, and Technical & System Software.

The results are as follows:


(The actual market caps for MSFT, ORCL and SAP are $312, $100, and $60 billion respectively. This is my first try at using Google Docs for charting, and it is not yet clear to me how to create the visual cues on the chart itself to indicate that these three companies have values that exceed $40 billion.)

This approach does miss a few companies that I would probably consider in scope for this blog. These companies are buried in other categories. For example, Symantec is classified in the Internet Software & Services category, which mostly contains companies whose primary source of revenue is from services rather than software sales. As another example, NAVTEQ appears in the Business Software & Services category, which is dominated by companies such as ADP whose primary source of revenue is from services rather than software sales.