Microsoft's Gates Talks Trends, Points to Rivals IBM, Sony "... Our biggest competitor is IBM. IBM has always been the biggest company in the computer business by number of employees or revenue. We also work with IBM a lot. This XML Web services have a lot of the key foundation technical work that's going to make that a broad standard and make that succeed. It is based on the partnership between IBM and Microsoft around this Web services activity.
Sun Microsystems is actually quite small now. They've shrunk quite a bit, and they mostly make expensive hardware. AOL is just a competitor primarily in the United States in dial-up. Sony is certainly a great company, and we work with them on a lot of things in the PC and interoperability area. And we compete very aggressively with each other on video games."