Slashdot Mirror
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?
... it's amazing that a company like Google, that has been on the stock market for only a few years, can have a market capitalization about equal to that of a technology powerhouse like Apple.
On the other hand, is there anyone in their right mind who thinks that Google will be as valuable after 30 years as Apple has proven to be?
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
Seriously, if you bought Apple stock when it was first available and sold it all in the early 80's you would have been incredibly rich. Then, if you would have bought it all back in the 90's and sold it again today you would have replenished what you would have spent in the mean time.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Apple is also larger than oracle, sap, and cisco, and nearly as large as IBM. The only tech company larger than Apple by any significant margin is Microsoft; but even then, Apple is more than 60% as large as Microsoft and is growing considerably faster.
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)
I remember the ups and the downs. Apple's stagnation during the Scully-Spindler-Amelio years. The failure of Copland and the dark age during which AAPL traded at $12/share and Sun take-over rumors ran rampant. Michael Dell's ass-hat punditry.
Then we saw the awesome Second Golden Age, a.k.a. the Return of Jobs - something we never thought could come to pass. We got the G3 (a terrific processor for its time) and the iMac. Of course it wasn't all rosy, we also had the The G4 MHz stall and the MHz Myth. But since Jobs' return there have been few misses and many outstanding hits. The greatness of OS X returned the Mac to its original place of software technological leadership. The iPod was a game changer, and even those of us who were among the hard-core Apple faithful never predicted what game changer it would prove to be in short order. And yes, the Intel defection proved to be (despite my anger toward it) a galvanizing force behind Mac platform growth. Now we have the iPhone (and iTouch) platform making history in its own right.
Apple has successfully captured so much market share in the last few years, people who will not likely return to the non-Apple world. Yes, the company is probably moderately overvalued right now, but with such growth and market saturation, a high valuation is sensible as long as the broader market can sustain recent rallies. Look at the iPhone sales estimates and then think about Apple's valuation. Google is a great company - unquestionably so - but it's an Internet property that can be replaced by a simple click of an address bar if a superior solution becomes available. (I'm not trivializing Google's place in the market but rather pointing to the fact that Internet leadership can change in quick order with disruptive technologies.) Not so with Apple, which isn't just a creative hardware vendor nor just a leading software producer, nor just a cultural business icon, but all that and more put together.
The only real question is, going forward, how long will Steve Jobs continue to lead the company. For he has always been the driving visionary force behind Apple's success, and without him Apple's value would take a substantial hit. I wouldn't want to be an AAPL share holder on the day he announces his retirement. Until then though, one can make a lot of money by buying Apple toward the bottom of market lows and holding on for almost inevitable new highs.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
A web business that has MICROSOFT shitting bricks.
If Microsoft had a magical "one-hit-kill" bullet that could eliminate just ONE major competitor, they'd pick Google, not Apple.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
The problem is there's a few things at work there:
1. Apple seems to have accumulated a cult-like following of people who self-identify with the corporation. It's weird.
2. Apple only competes in high-margin markets, where they often are price-competitive.
3. Apple doesn't disclose internal costs like R&D.
The stock market is a mechanism by which monetary inflation is captured and transferred to the wealthy.
HTH
Deleted
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.
yeah, the beta version has a known bug... it bytes.
*ducks*
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
I hate Apple because:
Every product I have owned, or belonged someone close to me, have failed within two years.
Apple does not respect or honour Norwegian consumer laws. You are required to provide 2 or 5 years of warranty at no additional cost beyong the initial investment in the product, but Apple insists on 90 days.
Apple is all about silos and locking in the user. Look at the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone for the best examples. It's a good business strategy for the mass market, but I prefer other vendors.
Hypes. Accompanied with fanboys.
... Apple stock price bears no relationship what-so-ever to the present or future value of the company.
News at eleven.
do you have any idea of how many companies had tried to put out 'rio' style portable music players? literally hundreds, so why has apple sold 150 million or more ipods? because they got it right, and they combined a sleek sexy music player with a cheap source of music, through the itunes store. I've explained to countless people they can make mp3's from most audio cds, and in general instead of learning a new program they ask ME to do the leg work of encoding their music. it takes money to use itunes, but it's easy to use.
and now, the ipod brand is more famous than the walkman brand was in the 80's.
the iphone is a huge printing press for money as well, they get money from the sale of it, and even more from the contract with at&t. jobs coming back to apple, and as the CEO really worked out great, so far. although i think even apple will start to feel the pain that so many tech companies are feeling from the global economic downturn that seems to be happening.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Where the iPod won it from the competition was ease of use.
Something like an iRier might have more features, and better specs, but have you ever tried to use one? I have.
I got my first Mac a year ago, but the first time I used one was in 1997 and after that I knew I would end up on a Mac eventually.
It was the time of win3.11 and win95, winNT4, (and I think Mac system7). I was at university and helped a lot of people with their computers. I was used to first having to "figure out" someone's computer before I could help them.
I also did some DTP work. At one point my computer couldn't handle what I was doing, and I ended up finishing my project at a professional DTP firm, who happened to also have QuarkXpress but on a big powerful dual head Mac. I was productive from the get go, and if I needed something, it would just be where I'd expect it to be and work intuitively, even outside the software I had experience with on Windows. At that point I understood that Apple is just miles ahead of the competition in UI design.
They are just very good in removing all things from an UI that you don't really need. Some rarely used options and a reduction in choice comes with that, but I'll do without an optic output for my digital music player if it means I have an interface that is easy to use.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
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