Few companies of Apple's size have been able to grow as rapidly as it has recently. In its last quarterly earnings report, Apple said net income increased 118 percent from a year earlier, to US$13.06 billion. Certainly, Apple's anomalous expansion has a huge impact on overall market data.

Excluding Apple's results from the broad S&P 500 index of share prices, for example, would take the index down from a 6.1 percent to a 3.0 percent overall share price growth this year, according to . Taking Apple profits out of the equation, profits for the index go from about break-even to a decline of 1.6 percent. Apple is traded on the Nasdaq, so it affects aggregate numbers for that specific exchange, often associated with tech since so many IT companies are listed there.

However, recent results show positive signs for other tech companies, especially in the enterprise tech market.

On Thursday, Red Hat said it had become . For the three months ending Feb. 29, revenue increased 25 percent year over year to $1.13 billion. Profit rose to $146.6 million from $107.3 million.

The sales figure is a vote of confidence from the corporate IT community in open-source software, as well as the open-source business model, since no user wants a supplier that is likely to go out of business anytime soon.