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Ballmer Says Google's Growth Is 'Insane'
eldavojohn writes "Steve Ballmer spoke to the Seattle PI this week, commenting that Google's pace of employee growth is 'insane,' and the company has few successful businesses outside of Internet search and advertising. He referred to Google's non-search efforts as 'cute.' Google's current number of employees is nearly doubling each year. 'I don't really know that anybody's proven that a random collection of people doing their own thing actually creates value.' Mr. Ballmer went on complain that, in general, competition for good programmers has become an issue. Even 'hedge funds' are looking for skilled coders, making the HR fight between the two companies that much more challenging."
When was the last time Microsoft's stock was over $100, let alone $400? Ballmer's more envious than anything -- he keeps wondering why no one at Google is reading the résumés he keeps sending.
No offense, but don't start investing.
A companies value is NOT reflected by the share price alone. It's the share price TIMES the number of outstanding shares.
Quick math:
Googles market cap is 137.43 billion; share price is 441.96; it has approximately 311 million shares circulating.
Microsofts market cap is 267.23 billion; share price is 27.31; it has appromately 9.7 billion shares circulating.
It's been argued that one of the main reasons that Google trades at such a high P/E ratio is because they've restricted the number of shares circulating... Like, if they split the stock to match the shares outstanding of other companies, there'd be so many shares circulating that the price would drop, not only just because there'd be more shares as a result of the splits, but because there would actually enough to fill the demand.
Not trully related to the discussion, but related to your comment...