The Difference Between Apple and Google Explained in Two Charts

Patents are shown in form of two bubble charts: every dot stands for an engineer who is featured in at least one patent application and the lines mean that two people worked together. Periscopic analyzed patent applications submitted by the companies in approximately the past ten years.

Apple chart has the dark spot that contains most of the patents. Periscopic sees more centralized structure in Apple with a comparatively small team of inventors that constantly work on new projects. The chart with Google patents has less density: there are almost no dark clusters, and the number of patents is equally distributed between the large number of employees.

Apple submitted 10,975 patent applications from 5,232 engineers in the past 10 years. During the same period, 8,888 Google engineers developed 12,386 patent applications. Periscopic shows the difference between development in Apple and Google on the example of their founders: the name of former head of Apple Steve Jobs is on 347 patents, while Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page participated in preparing 27 patents during the same period.

Also, the number of engineers per one patent is higher in Apple — on average, each of the applications was created by 4.2 professionals, whereas for Google this figure is 2.8 engineers. According to Periscopic, Apple engineer is almost twice as productive as his colleague from Google, with the average of nine patents versus four.