Tech Industry Financial History

Every annual revenue, R&D, operating-income, and net-income value on this page is pulled live from SEC EDGAR's /api/xbrl/companyfacts/CIK{cik}.json endpoint — the structured 10-K data the SEC publishes as public-domain JSON. Series are filtered to fiscal-year filings on Form 10-K (or 10-K/A / 20-F for cross-listed filers) of at least 350 days, deduplicated by fiscal-year end-date with the latest-filed value winning, and trimmed to roughly the last 22 years.

XBRL tag handling

The SEC's tag taxonomy changed under the FASB ASC 606 revenue-recognition transition in fiscal years 2018–2019. Older filings tag revenue as us-gaap:Revenues; newer filings use us-gaap:RevenueFromContractWithCustomerExcludingAssessedTax. The build script merges the two tag families per company so the revenue series spans the transition without a discontinuity. R&D, operating income, and net income are stable single-tag pulls (ResearchAndDevelopmentExpense / OperatingIncomeLoss / NetIncomeLoss).

Headcount — hand-curated, citation-anchored

Headcount is a special case. The SEC's XBRL company-facts feed exposes dei:EntityNumberOfEmployees in theory, but in practice none of the 25 companies on this page actually reports headcount through that tag — it's narrative-disclosed in the Item 1 (Business) section of each 10-K instead. The headcount values here are hand-curated from those Item 1 sections. Each data point is anchored to the SEC accession of the 10-K that originally disclosed the number, so visitors who want to verify a specific year can click through to the underlying filing on sec.gov. For recently-IPO'd companies (Palantir, Snowflake, Cloudflare, Datadog, MongoDB, ServiceNow), the headcount series begins at the first post-IPO 10-K rather than going back further.

Fiscal year alignment

Tech companies file on different fiscal calendars: Apple's FY ends in late September, Microsoft's in late June, Oracle's in late May, Salesforce's in late January, Cisco's in late July, Nvidia's in late January, and most others on the calendar year. Each data point on the chart is plotted at the company's actual fiscal-year-end date, not at December 31 of the named year. This makes the x-axis comparable across the universe but means the “FY2024” data point for Microsoft (period ending June 2024) sits to the left of the “FY2024” point for Apple (period ending September 2024) and Tesla (period ending December 2024).

What is intentionally excluded

• Computed live market cap. Live share price × stale shares-outstanding routinely produces a wrong number, especially when a company has issued or repurchased stock since the last 10-Q. Visitors who want market cap should read it from a public quote source.
• Forward guidance and analyst estimates. The page is reported actuals, not management projections or sell-side models.
• Editorial commentary on company performance. The chart is the answer.
• Per-segment financials beyond what 10-K segment disclosures already provide. Adding per-segment overlays for Microsoft / Apple / Amazon / Alphabet on the same page would clutter the visual; per-org pages on /orgs/ are the right home for that detail.
• Stock-price overlay. Out of scope for v1; the change-management page tracks this as an open question.

Related pages on this site

• Tech Filings — the merged newest-first feed of recent SEC filings from the same 25 companies. Every data point on this page traces back to a filing that's visible there.
• Tech Acquisitions — major M&A deals by the same companies. Acquisitions show up as inflection points on the revenue and headcount series here (Microsoft-LinkedIn 2016, Microsoft-Activision 2023, IBM-Red Hat 2019, Salesforce-Slack 2021, etc.).
• Major Tech Organizations — per-company profiles for the acquirers on this page (founders, current CEO, headcount-as-of-most-recent-quarter, revenue-as-of-most-recent-10-K).