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Apple's Market Cap Exceeds Google's
Lawrence Person writes "Mac Daily News was one of many Apple-followers to note that Apple Inc.'s market capitalization exceeded Google today. That means that the combined value of all Apple's outstanding shares of stock exceeded the combined value of all Google's outstanding shares of stock. Apple's stock is worth $157 billion and change vs. Google's $156 billion. Other companies Apple has surpassed in market cap include Cisco, HP, and Intel. Also, Apple is now worth 3 times the value of Dell Computer, despite Dell's founder and CEO declaring over a decade ago that if he ran Apple, he'd 'shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.'"
Look at the price of iPod's, iPhone's, Mac Books, and their other products. They are selling them at an incredible profit. Not hard to see why apple is worth so much. As much as I hate apple I have to give them credit.
Not really a shock.
One company's based on ubiquity and mindshare. The other's the same though less so, but actually retails physical items.
How can a company with $24B in sales, $3B in profit, and $40B in cash and assets (2007 figures) have a market cap of $160B?
Not only do they have an insane market cap, they also have tons of cash. The former means that it would be completely stupid to buy back shares with the latter.
So what are they going to do with that cash? Expanding the product line significantly would mean diluting the brand. Even buying / Starting a low end brand would have the same effect.
Well, when you factor in a rapidly growing computer market (for Apple) with lots of growth potential left, a rapidly growing music market with lots of growth potential, a rapidly growing smartphone market, a rapidly growing mobile applications market...
And so on.
The thing of it is, Apple can still miss in a few categories and still have tremendous room for growth. They have many legs of stability holding up their table of success (I daresay that's the most awful metaphor you'll encounter this week).
The market rewards innovation, mindshare, and success. Apple has all three...
If after that you are still mystified - buy mutual funds.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A little over ten years ago, liquidating Apple would have made sense, whatever else I might think about the company and the products, Jobs is a fucking miracle worker, and we need more business leaders with his ability (if maybe not ethics).
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
It's ridiculous to report what Dell said OVER A DECADE AGO about Apple. Leave your bias in a reply instead.
On the other side we have Apple. They produce gadgets and computers, that do have quality, but also a lot of brand hype. And are very expensive.
If there is a recession coming up, people will soon find that they can make do with their old gadgets a bit longer, or go with the cheaper option.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Well, when you factor in a rapidly growing computer market (for Apple) with lots of growth potential left, a rapidly growing music market with lots of growth potential, a rapidly growing smartphone market, a rapidly growing mobile applications market...
And so on.
The thing of it is, Apple can still miss in a few categories and still have tremendous room for growth. They have many legs of stability holding up their table of success (I daresay that's the most awful metaphor you'll encounter this week).
The market rewards innovation, mindshare, and success. Apple has all three...
If after that you are still mystified - buy mutual funds.
Everything the parent said is true. The amount of growth, on the other hand, is anyone one's guess and if they miss a "target" their stock price may get tanked. And I'd like to add, innovation isn't necessarily rewarded. SONY was one of the most innovative companies that has existed. But whenever they came out with a product, a competitor(s) came out with a cheaper one eroding Sony's margins to the point where they couldn't recoup much of their R&D for their products. Now they've pretty much become an also ran themselves. Apple seams to be doing well with their hit hard and fast strategy (create a new product, charge up the ass for it, and then when competitors come out with their own, lower the price but still keep the Apple premium for the brand loyalists.)
Basically, Apple is no longer a personal computer company: they're an electronic entertainment and fashion accessory company - much more profitable this way and shows the marketing genius of Jobs & Co.
You nailed it. Saying Google isn't a real business is like calling your local TV station a sham.
Put identity in the browser.
The stock market is a mechanism by which monetary inflation is captured and transferred to the wealthy.
HTH
Deleted
It really depends how much of Apple's target market is severely affected by a recession. Not everyone is affected equally.
They're not a web business. They're a marketing and datamining business, which happens to use the web to capture and distribute their data.
How about this....
What business is Harley Davidson in? Not Motorcycles. They're in the image and fantasy business. Middle aged professionals buy them and pretend to be careless free spirit rebels on the weekends and then on Monday, they're back to being the Sam the accountant or lawyer or engineer. I saw quite a few "bikers" with their Harley Davidson logo'd leather attire (huge business for Harley!) and Rolex watches. Real motorcycle enthusiasts, from what I'm told, prefer BMW or something Japanese: Harleys are junk.
What business is McDonald's in? Business process. When someone buys a franchise from McDs, they're buying a way to do business and a name for the burger joint that they open.
Estee Lauder was famous for saying that she was in the business of hope not cosmetics. She sold women the hope that they can look young and beautiful like her models.
My point is that if Apple were a computer company, they'd be making the crappy margins that Dell and the other PC makers are making.
60% of Microsoft with less than 10% of the market ?!
Top news story at 11: "Chair seen in orbit around Pluto"
You nailed it. Saying Google isn't a real business is like calling your local TV station a sham.
That's a good comparison. Although Google seems to be more honest about it, and it's nicer to us than many TV stations.
Buy a Nokia.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
No wonder all their shit is overpriced plastic crap!
I'd rather have a beige box, save a grand, and have better software. (xp, mind you, vista blows)
So, you're a fan of plastic crap, as long as it's not overpriced?
I think the OP is confusing AppleCare phone service (which is 90 days) with their actual warranty which is 1-3 years depending on if you buy the AppleCare plan. And as anyone who buys a Apple product knows, you ALWAYS buy the Protection Plan contrary what is normal practice for other electronics. I have gotten 2 brand new laptops out of that extra 200 bucks you pay since they will go through hoops to fix things even if its not entirely their fault.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
... Apple stock price bears no relationship what-so-ever to the present or future value of the company.
News at eleven.
Ahhhh, you lost me at "real work". Nice try, but the "real people" use "real computers" argument ran dry about 5 years ago.
Most of their software stack is open. Only the OS UI and non-OS applications are closed. And as for *radically* insecure? Come on, how much is Bill paying you for making this shit up? It's slightly less secure than the average Linux distro, slightly more secure than Vista, and *radically* more secure than XP. (Don't pretend that security really matters to you and then say you'd rather have XP and that "Vista blows"; the problems with Vista are compatibility issues and resource hogging, not - relative to other MS products - security).
That's a good comparison. Although Google seems to be more honest about it, and it's nicer to us than many TV stations.
I find that a dubious assertion. Your local TV station is far more benign than Google.
1. They don't know everything about your browsing habits.
2. They don't know who emails you, who you email, what you email etc.. or your IM, your documents etc.
3. They don't know what products you prefer to buy, how much you are willing to pay for them (if you are using google checkout)
These are just some of the ways that Google could screw you over. An average TV station doesn't have as much information on you nor does it have the tools to cause you as much grief.
This whole Mac VS PC thing is stupid and childish. I don't buy Apple products because I am cheap, and I would rather spend my time making things work the way I want them to than letting some 'Genius' make them work for me.
Peroid. End of story.
Of course, what Apple calls "research and development" is largely development; the company does no research to speak of, instead preferring to cull the best ideas from the market place.
Yes, Apple copied the Rio but dropped the 32 MB of memory and put in a hard disk, omitted the clunky buttons, left out the slow transfer speeds, increased the display side by probably 10x... hell put a Rio and an iPod side by side and I bet you can't tell the difference.
Trolling is a art,
Just like the "usability" argument that Mac users like to trot out died about 13 years ago......
Spoken like someone who hasn't been to a usability or UI design conference... ever. Apple designed UIs are the gold standard of the industry, including the OS X interface. It sure isn't perfect and experts discuss the flaws regularly, but compared to everything else out there it's not much of a contest.
anyone?
how dare a company make record profits!!
Apple is using a lot of open source code, and they have released some open source code themselves. But what have they actually contributed to the open source community? I can't think of any significant piece of Apple software that runs on any Linux distribution.
Apple has made very significant contributions to what is now Webkit, to zeroconf, to the shared BSD subsystem, etc. But you have a very real point. When Apple invents something from scratch and contributes it (like LaunchD) it is occasionally cloned, but rarely do developers take Apple's code and run with it. This is important, but ties into your next comment.
They have raised the bar for software/hardware technology in general.
With what? Quartz, HFS+, Cocoa, Darwin, and XCode do not "raise the bar" on anything. Apple fans like to point to USB, OS X, Bonjour, Quicktime, and similar technologies, but Apple's contributions there were either to adopt an existing standard that was coming anyway, or to take an existing technology, tinker a little with it, and release it under their own name.
Apple has raised the bar. They took many rough standards and turned them into powerful and usable tools (zeroconf). They introduced innovative UIs (dock and expose). They took old and crufty parts of UNIX and redesigned them (LaunchD, basic directory structure, ACLs). They introduced powerful technologies that are all their own (OpenStep, signing framework, system services).
Despite all this and despite their popularity, the OSS community has a lousy track record of adopting those technologies and ideas. Their still isn't a dock clone that has all the functionality of Apple's. There still isn't a major Linux distro that ships with a dock or expose working by default. None of the Linux distros I've used have successfully cloned Apple's ubiquitous application of zeroconf. No Linux distro has yet copied OpenStep or even tried for compatibility with OS X. If you talk to Linux on the desktop users (people who should know what the competition does) 99% of them don't even know what Apple's system services are and if you explain it, they eventually agree it is really cool, but way too much work for them to try to clone.
There are a lot of reasons for this state of affairs. In some cases Apple has not played as nicely as they could, with licensing issues and their culture of secrecy. In many cases Apple makes sweeping changes to optimize OS X for the desktop and there is no central authority in the rest of the OSS community to mandate the same or even develop a real consensus. In many cases, Linux developers are a lot more interested in Linux as an appliance or server and specifically don't want to make changes that will help for a desktop but may add bloat for other uses. In some cases the OSS community is simply ignorant of what Apple does because they don't use Apple products due to philosophical differences or simply because Apple is not as common as Windows.
Whatever the reason, my perspective is Apple gives and takes from the OSS community about as well as many other mixed contributors, but because they are working in the desktop OS space and because of the reasons above, their contributions are ignored by Linux on the desktop developers (which is the only relevant market they're innovating in). Apple has been pretty good about adopting useful stuff from Windows and Linux (virtual desktops, filesystem improvements, misc code) but while their are projects to try to clone some of Apple's new tech, for the most part those are small projects and they are not integrated into mainstream Linux distros. That's one of the reasons why gOS's adoption of the dock was both encouraging (yay OS X feature parity) and disheartening (poorly done with only a little bit of the functionality).
In short I think you're right that the OSS community is not benefiting much by what Apple has been doing, but I think that is largely the fault of the OSS community for not takin
If I had Apple stock, I would sell. They have executed amazingly well over the last decade, but they also got lucky. With portable music players, Apple was at the right place at the right time and got out ahead of everyone. Will there be another chance like that? The iPhone is doing well, but it faces heavy competition from companies that are much more prepared this time around. With the Air and Apple TV, they're trying to stay ahead, but not gaining much traction.
Apple's use of slick looking devices and clean, optimized UI gives them an advantage and allows them to mark up prices. However, other companies are going to learn to do these things nearly as well, and then Apple will have to compete more on price. They aren't going anywhere, because they have cash reserves, faithful customers, and they do make fine products. But I think they've peaked.
Then again, perhaps I'll look back at this post in 10 years and laugh, as Apple's valuation approaches $1 trillion and they buy out an ailing Microsoft...
Can we seriously learn what the word bricked means, please?
I like quicktime on the Mac quite a bit more than I like Media Player on a Windows box. Quicktime on Windows is just a clash of different cultures.