On the heels of a study by Apple released Friday saying that it had “created or supported” 514,000 American jobs, a report commissioned by Microsoft and IDC predicts that cloud computing services will generate nearly 14 million jobs worldwide by 2015. That report says the number of cloud-related jobs already stands at 6.7 million. Apple, the world’s most valuable company, has created approximately 700,000 jobs abroad with manufacturers of its iPhones, iPads and other products. It employs 47,000 people in the United States, which Business Insider breaks down as 27,000 retail store employes, most of whom make  about $12 an hour; about 8,000 who work in Apple Care call centers; and about 12,000 corporate executives. (Surely those who work at corporate aren't all executives.) However, in the United States, the study includes jobs outside Apple's direct employment, which has drawn a lot of criticism. Business Insider put it this way:

The number, for example, includes UPS and Fedex employees who deliver iPhones. It includes Corning employees who make glass for iPhones (folks who would presumably be making glass for Samsung, if they weren't making it for Apple). And it includes everyone even tangentially related to the "app economy." And so on. And if Apple is going to take credit for all those jobs, it might as well include the employees of restaurants where Apple employees eat, the employees of car dealerships where Apple employees get their rides, the employees of grocery stores and clothes stores where Apple employees shop, the employees of lawn-mowing companies and cleaning services and wireless companies that count Apple employees as customers, the employees of schools where the kids of Apple employees get educated, and so on.

And according to The Wall Street Journal:

While several economists and employment experts agree that Apple has an economic impact that goes beyond the people it directly employs, they said it was difficult to conclude from Apple’s study what the company’s benefit is to the overall jobs market.

The overall "app economy" from Apple, Android and others recently was estimated to have created 466,000 jobs in the United States related to mobile applications since 2007. Joshua Wright, in the blog of Economic Modeling Specialists Inc., looks further at Apple's role in that. As for the report on cloud jobs, TechCrunch points out that Microsoft, obviously, is pushing is cloud technology, but IDC is looking at the bigger picture, to include startups that serve the consumer market as well as the enterprise market. That report predicts the jobs will be equally split among small and large businesses and more than one-third will fall in three main categories: communications/media (2.4 million jobs); banking (1.4 million jobs) and discrete manufacturing (1.3 million jobs). It says the real growth will be in developing countries, and that countries such as China and India will lead the way in development of jobs in cloud services.