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Microsoft and Apple Rumble Into Middle Age
Hugh Pickens writes "Bill Briggs writes on MSNBC that the two tech titans are rumbling into middle age as Microsoft marked its 35th birthday on Sunday and Apple turned 34 late last week. But while Microsoft, to some, appears a tad flabby in the middle — a Chrysler Town & Country driver with a 9 pm bedtime — Apple, in some eyes, looks sleeker and younger — a hipster in a ragtop Beemer packed with chic friends sporting mobile toys. 'The difference between the two companies is that Apple has been fearless about transformational change while Microsoft has been reluctant to leave its past behind,' says Casey Ayers, president of MegatonApps. 'Microsoft has always been loath to change and risk alienating some of its customers, but its inability to leave the past behind has left their product line bloated and dysfunctional.' On current accounting ledgers, Microsoft overshadows Apple: Microsoft's market cap is $255.75 billion; Apple's is $213.98 billion. But Apple is getting awfully big — awfully fast — in Microsoft's rearview mirror. Consider that a decade ago Microsoft's market cap was almost $590 billion and Apple's was about $16 billion. So while Apple cheered its opening weekend of iPad sales, what wish should Microsoft have made when it blew out its birthday candles Sunday? 'More than anything, Microsoft's birthday wish should be for fearless leadership,' says Ayers. 'Without someone at the top who feels an urgency to constantly innovate in meaningful ways, Microsoft will shrink and become less relevant with each birthday to come.'"
Microsoft has always been loath to change and risk alienating some of its customers
Uh, maybe if you're only looking at Windows and/or Office products. They also seem to do greatly, so why fix something that isn't broken?
But with some of their other divisions I wish they didn't change. Anyone else remember such from Microsoft Games as Flight Simulator, Age of Empires series, Halo, Train Simulator, MechWarrior, Links, Midtown Madness, Motocross Madness.. Now that they changed they're not publishing or developing those kind of games anymore. In fact no one is. Microsoft Games is just for Xbox 360 anymore.
"Without someone at the top who feels an urgency to constantly innovate in meaningful ways, Microsoft will shrink and become less relevant with each birthday to come."
Just yesterday slashdotters laughted how Microsoft is burning money on their online division like Bing and other properties, how it's completely useless. Which one it is now, to think long term or not to think?
More like gaunt. Someone get Steve a steak and some poutine or something, damn.
--- Do you believe in the day?
It's not a matter of if Apple will pass Microsoft now, but when. Google's also making a run at it, but they've got a lot further to go.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Thanks for reminding me how damned old I'm getting.
Free Martian Whores!
Sorry but that's my wife quoted as the co author of the Digitally Daunted book I am the other co author and well to have that on slashdot is CRAZY cool and I am going to waste Karma on that
"The difference between the two companies is that Apple has been fearless about transformational change while Microsoft has been reluctant to leave its past behind," says Casey Ayers
More like Apple comes up with the great ideas and transformational change and Microsoft copies them, badly.
Microsoft is that guy at a dance club hitting on his daughter's college age friends.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
...more like a tippy-toe...
Microsoft and Apple Rumble Into the Middle Ages?
I though it was going to be some pointed commentary on DRM or something.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
God, I just lost 40 IQ points reading the garbage summary. Can you be any more biased?
It is a hardware company vs. a software company.
Maybe 20 years ago they competed but that is no longer the case.
Nothing bias against either side but Apple's main focus is gadgets while Microsoft's main focus is software. Yes, Apple makes software and yes Microsoft makes hardware but neither are their main focuses.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
Bullshit. Apple's product line and GUI design has remained the same for the last 20 years, and microsoft's design principles and interface organization have changed 10 times!
Steve has some powerful coolaid, I tell you what.
Apple is 90% marketing hype and 10% reality. It is the best proof that shiny objects properly promoted sell for a lot of money whether or not they have a merit to do so.
Apple builds useful devices, but so do tons of other companies. The difference is - Apple is amazing at hitting all the right notes with the right people.
So to continue the analogy, to me Apple looks more like a shill salesman, driving his silver "look at my midlife crisis" roadster while his thinning hair is combed over and firmly glued to cover a bald spot. :)
In the meantime, they keep promoting closed, proprietary and severely limited one way network "consumer terminals" (devices whose primary purpose is to shove predefined content at consumer, more like TV than to facilitate user creativity more like a computer).
OS X is a nice operating system if you like UNIX API and shell and don't mind some internal clunkiness (poor memory management, weird process states). That's all I care about as a developer. The rest is just snake oil.
Great I am older than Microsoft by Two Days. I am not sure if this makes me fell happy or sad.
Middle age starting to show, grey hairs poking through, kids are more energetic, getting more canny, income reasonsable. Well enough about Microsoft - what about me ?
Something that is vital to Apple overtaking Microsoft is a shift in attitude of the "zealous Apple consumer". Most folks that use Apple products are fine, but holy jeebus do Apple zealots piss me off. We get it, your brand of choice is shiny and pretty. Shut up about it.
Again, I know this only applies to a small portion of the Apple userbase, but that small portion is unbelievably annoying.
The usual "this is only my opinion" disclaimer applies.
Living With a Nerd
I read that as "MS and Apple rumble into the middle ages".
I did have time to imagine computer managed fortresses, before reading the rest of the news.
Yes, it was a sad disappointment.
There's another component you need if you want to use fearless leadership and disruptive innovation to be the bedrock of your success: you need to also be right. Apple's taken some big product risks. None of them were exactly bet-the-company-big risks, but pretty risky. The fact that we're still talking about Apple is that they've taken chances and been right. There are plenty of companies out there that had a scary-cool product or technology, something transformational, but missed something along the way: misjudged the market, misjudged their capital needs, rushed a buggy product to market, etc. Don't hear much from those companies anymore.
While there's something to be said for bluffing in poker and going all in, it's much better to go all in when you've got the cards. You can bluff and buy the pot only so many times before someone calls you on it and you're out of the game.
Microsoft has been consistently successful - in and of itself, that makes it hard to "leave the past behind". Over the same period, Apple made a slew of really bad decisions which brought the company pretty much into irrelevance by the mid-1990s. For Apple, leaving the past behind was an asset - Apple basically had to make itself over just to survive. That's served Apple well this decade, but let's not forget where they were (compared to Microsoft) previously.
#DeleteChrome
Could not be more obnoxious sounding. Only hipsters love hipsters because they often don't see how truly annoying they are.
Market capitalization is essentially meaningless as a measure of a company's strength, i.e. it's ability to continue operations while also facilitating growth in a competitive environment.
All that market capitalization ever tells you is what some fool would pay to acquire the company whole at the current market price quotation.
It doesn't reflect what one should pay.
It doesn't reflect what the book value of the company is (Assets minus liabilities minus intangibles).
It doesn't reflect what the intrinsic value of the company is (book value plus discounted operating cash flows forward - i.e. a measure of its effectiveness as a cash generating engine).
It doesn't tell you anything about product presence, sales, operating income, debt load, or any other metric that has anything to do with the actual "strength" of a company.
Journalists need to stop referencing "market cap" as if it bears greater meaning than "The (typically) overinflated price only a sucker would pay."
Market capitalization has nothing to do with the size or quality of an organization. It has to do with how much investors are willing to pay for a share of stock. It's a completely and totally arbitrary figure, as anybody who lived through the dot-bomb days should thoroughly understand by now.
I don't respond to AC's.
That for the longest time, Apple was considered a joke and that the 90's where pretty much a dark age for them. It wasn't really until the sleek imac came out that their fortunes turned around and everything since then has been really a one trick pony (as in the imac, the iphone and the ipad share very similar visual design).
MS have had their dark age too, but listening to the poster you'd think that Apple were always the hip kid on the block. Personally I think next year is the return of MS (and I've been one of MS's biggest critics... 90% of my machines at home run Linux), given Natal and the Courier. The ipad was a serious lack of imagination... woah, a bigger iphone, whodathunkit? :)
insert year of the linux desktop comment here
This comment will probably go down in flames, but it seems like this article is just an excuse to brown nose Steve Jobs. Apple makes fad devices; pretty nice devices but they are still playing to a fad (just take a look at their stock price). Microsoft, on the other hand, makes business computing possible on over 90% of the world's computers.
If you want an analogy here goes. Apple may be the hip guy who shaved his head to hide his middle aged bald spot, and hangs out with trendy friends. However, Microsoft is driving the minivan around because he actually has shit to get done while Apple is living off a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Where is Bimmer the car? I've never heard that term in the US.
Looking quick on Google, apparently in the BMW community, good for them.
IMHO Microsoft's dominance has reached its peak, 2010 will mark the beginning of the end of the firm grip that they had over the OS market. Windows is so bloated from carrying all the compatibility crap, regarding both software and hardware, while OS X only needs to carry what is needed, given that they only need to support their own hardware. For example, Snow Leopard has *lost* size compared to Leopard because they were shifting out PPC support. Microsoft will always have to support thousands of different hardware configurations if it wants to stay mainstream. The iPad will be a huge success, while Microsoft is late to jump on the bandwagon (to be fair, they probably were too early at some point), same with Windows 7 Phone something. They fail to get innovation out because they have so much to loose. Due to their business strategy to lock customers into their products, i.e. not complying to standards, they don't need to innovate, they just have to make sure that the locks are still firm. A good indication of the beginning of the end is that it is starting to get lucrative for companies to break out of the Microsoft prison. Apple is doing the right thing, they keep their products simple, they don't try to appeal to every human crawling the face of the earth, and they emphasize on products that actually *work*. Wonder why there are thousands of books on switching from Mac to PC but not a single one on switching from PC to Mac?
Apple has basically avoided the corporate market, which is where most of Microsoft's money is made, however much ground they are gaining in the home market. Toes are being stepped on, to be sure, but I just don't see Microsoft and Apple as being on a collision course for the most part. Given the conservative nature of the corporate market, what's much more likely is that Apple will end up as the dominant home player, at least for a while, and Microsoft will follow IBM into being solely a corporate player.
The danger to Apple is that very large enterprises always ossify, and the market they are coming to dominate in the short term -- which is basically home entertainment electronics -- is vastly more competitive and unstable than the PC market has ever been (or likely ever will be). When much of your appeal is driven by current fashion trends, you're vulnerable in a way that a vendor of business software seldom faces.
Note that I'm not saying Apple is doomed or any similar nonsense. Apple is doing very well and probably will continue to do so for some time, and Microsoft will probably continue its slow decline. What I'm saying is that Microsoft and Apple are less and less in competition with each other. Apple will probably spend a lot more time in the future competing with companies like Sony and JVC and LG than it does with Microsoft, and they'll most likely do very well, at least as long as Jobs is at the helm. After Jobs, I'm rather less sanguine about Apple's future because people like Jobs (or, for that matter, Gates) tend not to groom their successors very well.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Microsoft's appetite for aquisitions is part of its downfall. They are constantly distracted by taking over other companies, some of them with very little to do with their core competancy. Often these aquisitions are simply lost money because they take them over and ruin a perfectly good business. Contrast Apple who rarely do aquisitions, and when they do they've got a really really good reason for it, related to a strategic vision.
Didn't IBM used to be a hardware company?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If Apple suddenly disappeared, people could easily get equivalent products from other manufacturers, since other companies sell equivalent phones, MP3 players and computers. While they don't have the Apple brand and may not be as polished in some aspects, they do essentially the same things.
On the other hand, the reason Microsoft has so much overhead is that they provide infinite backwards compatibility for their corporate clients. People love bashing Microsoft, but they forget that MS must provide binary compatibility for their clients who unconditionally have to run really old apps, because their businesses depend on it. Windows must run on a huge variety of hardware combinations, and must be supported over 10+ year lifespans. For example, Windows XP licenses were sold from 2002 to early 2009, and Microsoft will support this platform for many years into the future.
Apple products and Linux distributions often break compatibility between revisions, for legitimate technical reasons. But Microsoft can't do that even when they want to, because their hundreds of thousands of corporate clients can't be expected to update all their software accordingly. The thousands of hardware manufacturers won't all update their drivers either. Regardless, Microsoft tried doing that and Vista happened. It took several years for manufacturers and Microsoft itself to catch up, and we got Windows 7, which works quite well.
So if Microsoft is reluctant to leave the past, it's because it has contractual obligations to support its clients. Apple makes no such commitments and sells primarily to end users. Thus, it can afford to make more aggressive changes.
You want idle - room 12A, just along the corridor.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I think Apple is back dooring the corporate market via the iPhone. I've run into a couple of companies lately that are all Microsoft, all the time on the desktop but have made the iPhone as their corporate standard.
And in some cases, Macs are still hanging in there in marketing/publishing roles within businesses even though the "need" for a Mac in that role has long passed (IMHO).
anybody remember IBM? Remember how anybody predicted IBM would die, go bancrupt or beocme irrelevant? Good. Big companies have the tendency to sometimes have weak phases and then - if they realize what is going on - strong phases.
"The difference between the two companies is that Apple has been fearless about transformational change while Microsoft has been reluctant to leave its past behind"
Lies! You (mercifully?) forget Microsoft Bob. Also, the first time I ever heard of tablet computers is when I heard Bill Gates hyping it as the next revolutionary step forward for computers at least five years ago. The issue is not so much Microsoft's boldness as its incompetency (though the fact that the media doesn't treat Gate's words as inspired prophesy like it does Jobs's probably has something to do with it, too).
Property is theft.
You were wise to post as AC. One of my very first /. posts was to point out this distinction, and I was quickly modded Troll.
The irony about car analogies being the analogies of choice on /. is that there are actually very few car guys here.
The whole point of stock and capitalization is that investors (shareholders) give up their cash with the expectation of a return on their investment - the expectation is that the company they invest in will grow. Hopefully that's more than the rate of inflation. Short term gains and losses are one thing, but ten years is not a short term. It's definitely long enough to call it a trend.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yeah, you hipsters sneer at a 9 pm bedtime. But while you punks are rolling into work at nine-ish and don't really get going until around 10 or so .. I've gotten in a full day's work and I'm out the door by 4 pm to enjoy a beautiful summer spring day.
Early bird, worm, etc.
Display some adaptability.
The two seem more yin-and-yang than antagonistic to me; as I recall, MS "loaned" Apple $100M back when Jobs returned to run the company.
Given that, it's not really surprising that they are moving through life "hand-in-hand".
Reminds an old nerd of Marvel v. DC . . . or (for the "hipsters") east coast v. west coast.
WTF does what the market think of a company's stock have to do with the real world?
The difference between Microsoft and Apple is Microsoft primarily builds buisiness software. Apple primarily builds fashion accessories. Think about it. You can get a much better device from someone else with pretty much every accessory apple builds but you won't be as cool unless it has an apple on it.
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And Apple is ripping benefits for first capitalizing on that. Non-technical users want a well built appliance with a single point of support that runs a few dozen applications. This may not be the product that big corporation want, as central administration and customization is limited. This is not what geeks want, as much of both hardware and software is locked up and proprietary. But for many users its worth sacrificing one kind of freedom (ability to run pr0n games or web servers on their phone) for another (having a phone that doesn't rack up the bill by running malware on background or needs a system administrator). Each group of users deserve a solution that caters to their needs. Apple's smart move was to target the largest one. Microsoft's problem is that they haven't wholeheartedly committed to anyone.
When i partially read the title tought that was about Microsoft and Apple moving us to the Middle Age, but patents and their economic policies are from a bit later than those dates. The least i could imagine that was about those companies getting old.
Life expectancy:
male: 75.65 years
female: 80.69 years
Source
Therefore, middle age for women is 40.345 and middle age for men is 37.825 years.
MS has primarily been a software company as far as PCs go. Users wind up buying primarily a hardware system, that typically has MS on it.
MS winds up being limited by the innovation of its "partners". Apple has profited from being vertically integrated making both hardware & software.
Warren Buffett once said in an answer to a reporter's question, that he wouldn't invest in MS because he couldn't see the long term investment strategy of basing a business on PC software. That seems to be an indication of a conundrum for MS.
Question: Does Ballmer have a strategy to break out of the partner limitations?
As software and programming become more routine, will Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba and others finally pick open source?
I don't know, but The Markets will tell us.
Yes, I was picturing Gates and Jobs swinging Medieval weapons at each other.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Umm, generally middle age refers to a period of a person's life, not a point in time. The US census bureau considers middle age to be 35-54, so claiming a company is becoming "middle aged" when it is 35 is not really all that unusual or outside of the normal use of the phrase.
It isn't like they have anything to do with each other anyway.
Oblivion Awaits
Yeah, that must be it. Transformational change -- not to be confused with metamorphic change, or modificational change.
The filesystem is the package manager
Asheron's Call
"Hover" (Win95 companion CD game)
Troll is unfair in this situation, but there is no "-1, useless pedantry" mod so you get what you get.
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Since we're talking about Apple it's bummer.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Ballmer is a sales guy with no understanding of technology and no vision. I'm happy to watch him destroy Microsoft but it's amazing he gets to do it.
So the BS in the summary is perfectly OK, but *I* am trolling? Fuck off slashbotters.
What a ridiculously conservative and anti-life time we live in. Quick, get old, get married, and die! Is this all that life is to you ageist deathoid nutters?
Why does everyone that posts an article on this site try so hard to be funny?
You're NOT funny, you all sound so lame (this is a supposed "geek" site, though).
By the way, while trying to be so 'funny', you misspelled "Beamer"...and it's BIMMER, in this case, not "Beamer".
Understand culture before you try and abuse it.
More like Miata.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Apple gets a liver transplant... Microsoft still needs a heart..
as a means of ranking one company against another. Or did we learn nothing from Enron and Worldcom? Look instead at sales, at product diversification, licensing and pipelines, and at past performance relative to market performance in terms of alpha/beta. Back in the early 1980s, when Apple launched the Lisa/Mac and Microsoft was launching Windows 1.0, Apple's employee number, market cap *and* sales were literally hundreds of times larger than Microsoft's at that time. Look where they went, and where they are now.
Da Blog
Mac sales are actually down and they have a long way to go before dominating the home.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-200903-201004
...your definition of monopoly. In order to be a monopoly you have to have dominant market share. Period, end of story. Using the word monopoly in any other context is abuse of the word monopoly.
Microsoft is and continues to be a monopoly. They have 90% of the desktop OS PC market, and in the 90s they used that dominating control to armtwist PC manufacturers into not allowing AOL or netscape, both direct competitors, to be preinstalled on those PCs. They bullied the biggest of firms, IBM, into higher fees just because IBM would not play ball in exactly the way they wanted. IBM at the time was a bigger company than Microsoft. If you can bully IBM, of all companies, you have way too much power.
Apple does not dominate the cell phone or smart phone market
Apple does not dominate the desktop PC market
Apple does not dominate the desktop OS market
Apple does dominate the portable MP3 music player market
So your comments do have merit if you were talking the portable MP3 player market, but you never clarified that, and I seriously doubt you are only talking about MP3 players.
You also have to keep in context what Microsoft and apple does as a monopoly. Microsoft used it's market dominance to damage competitors and stifle competition so they could drive up prices on their software. Apple has strong armed, who? The RIAA? The MPAA? The telecom companies? Talk about monopolies! Apple doesn't have anyone downstream to strong arm, and you'd be hard pressed to find someone upstream manufacturing devices for Apple that is getting strong armed. Apple is in fact bringing more things in house, so that they own the pieces to design.
Do I think that it would be nice to have more freedom on our devices? Yes. Do I think apple censoring apps on the app store is wrong? Yes. Do I have ethical and moral concerns with how they treat developers and selectively control the market for their own apps? Yes. Do I think they are a monopoly? HELL NO. I could switch to windows in a heartbeat. I could switch to Symbian, Palm, Android, Windows or Blackberry in a second if it wasn't for contracts which, while supported by Apple, are not directly Apple's and need to be addressed ultimately with the phone company, not Apple. The iPod touch is a dominating music player, but it's also going up against PSP and nintendo for gaming, which it doesn't have a dominant market in, and I could switch to either of those for portable gaming. I could simply chose not to use the iPad.
As a consumer and as a developer, I have a choice, so far. That is, not to work with Apple and work on the other platforms where I could be a success as well. I think the best companies find a way to work with all of them, but the secret is, you have a choice here. And choice = no monopoly.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
What idiot decided to let the poster use 35 as middle age? middle age today is closer to 50 than 35. Geez these stupid kidz try to make it younger every year!
Why bother
Microsoft seems to think that if you spend a lot of time talking about innovation you're actually doing it, while Apple tends to keep their mouth shut until it's done.
Oh yeah? So for how many months were Apple waffling on about the iPad before it was finally released?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Yeah, but you can't count those years you're wearing Depends and your relatives worry about you wandering away from the nursing home. And life expectancy has little to do with the median person's lifetime; my grandmother lived a hundred years, so for her middle age would have been fifty. My best friend died two weeks short of his 40th birthday, so for him, twenty was middle age, according to your pedantic and incorrect definition of "middle age".
You're middle aged when you start getting thick around the middle and your hair starts graying and your arms start getting too short when you're trying to read, and life expectancy has nothing to do with that. For most people it's the middle thirties when it starts.
Free Martian Whores!
Market cap is not meaningless. That you suggest it is shows more about your ignorance than the subject at hand. The reason why journalists (and everyone else) quote market cap is simple: It is the current real value of the company. The market capitalization (stock price x number of shares) is the judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to the value of a company. There is no appeal procedure. There is no subjective panel who decides whether to accept the value or not. It simply is what it is and the market decides what the price is.
Everything else you listed is nothing more than an opinion. However, the actual stock price is a fact and can be acted upon. I hope you understand the distinction. One is like the real world (stock price) and the others are like academia (intrinsic value, book value, strength, etc, etc) where we can debate what the numbers should be.
You can not go sell your shares anywhere in the world for "book value".
You can not go sell your shares anywhere in the world for "intrinsic value".
You can not go sell your shares anywhere in the world for "what someone should pay".
You can not go sell your shares anywhere in the world for "strength".
You CAN, however, go sell your shares for whatever price/market cap the shares are being traded at -- right now.
ALL of those things are implied and accounted for in the price of the stock. The stock price is the sum total of all available information in the world, including wars, famine, tea leaves, psychic predictions, and anything else you (or others) believe might affect the company. This all comes out during buying/selling and the price levels that are established throughout the day. For every buyer, there is a seller. For every seller, there is a buyer. Together, they determine the actual, real world prices that you can buy or sell at.
...but I seem to recall Microsoft having to prop Apple up with an input of cash, not the other way around.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Since the Supreme Court has held that corporations have the rights of natural persons, Microsoft is now eligible to run for president.
Seriously, they haven't ruled on election qualification, but the logic of their decision allowing unlimited corporate spending in elections forces that conclusion.
Windows/Office only sell because of inertia, they are far from being best in class and wouldn't be able to stand on their own in a freely competitive market.
The geek sees an office suite.
The office manager sees one component of integrated - centrally managed - office system that scales well to an enterprise of any size.
In his opinion - the MS product is best-of-breed.
Win 7 cut itself a 10% share of the global client in market in less than six months - and thaat in the arguably quite competitive consumer market.
This is a really bad argument on many levels. This is right there with comparing either Microsoft or Apple to Google, and declaring Google is the obvious better company since they have grown even faster then either of those 2 in a shorter time frame. Thing is where their money is coming from. Microsoft makes most of it's money through Windows sales and XBox360 sales (I think the XBox is now profitable). Apple sells small devices and online music. Sure these 2 companies overlap in some aspects. Microsoft sells Windows, Apple sells OSX, but they only sold I think like 17 million macs to the 40+ million iPods, who knows how many iPhones, ect... Most of their money comes from device sales, not their computer sales. Apple sells iPod, Microsoft sells Zune, but the Zune doesn't sell anywhere near as well as the iPod and doesn't make much money for Microsoft. Apple sells the iPhone, Microsoft sells Windows Mobile OS. but the Windows Mobile doesn't sell anywhere near as well. These companies can't be easily compared anymore since they sell different products in different ways with different results.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
What waffling? Apple never discussed the iPad except to say that they did not comment on upcoming products. Everyone else was discussing the iPad rumors but none of it came from Apple itself.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The iPad was officially released two days ago yet Jobs was waffling on about it in January in "Keynote" speeches, or whatever it is marketing types call them.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
A Beemer for Apple? No, Beemers are not a triumph of style over engineering. I once dismantled a Mac to see if there was anything worth salvaging, but found it was made out of crap assembled with once-only barbed bits that looked designed to be banged together by monkeys.
Apple are more like one of those quirky electric cars that look like a translucent folding space helmet, owned by a slight guy in pink trousers banging on in a falsetto voice about "style".
Microsoft are a Ford minivan, driven by a PHB who knows squit about how it works and droning on about "walking the talk", "leveraging enriched experience" and "hitting the ground running".
Linux is an armoured car with all the rivets showing co-driven by Scottie and a beatnik, arguing about how the owner's handbook should be phrased.
I don't like Beemers anyway.
I understood waffling to be the same as equivocating or vacillating like candidates "waffling" about their stances on an important subject. I'm not sure what you mean, maybe "waxing on"
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I think "The Jobs Delusion" would be a great title for a book. The tone that this article takes (and literally thousands of other articles in the last week) overlooks everything that is wrong about Apple and everything that is right about Microsoft.
Both companies have their faults, but it would be refreshing to see a journalist that isn't in some kind of transcendent state of euphoria every time they see a picture of Steve Jobs or hear about a new incremental Apple release.
I don't think the parent was talking about selling shares at all. If all you care about is selling your stock shares, then yes, market cap is an important number.
What he was talking about was the "strength" of the company. This is a little different. Stock price is highly volatile, and can change in an instant. A company whose stock price doubles in a day due to some press release did not suddenly become twice as strong. Or what about a company whose stock price tanks in a day, going to 1/10 of its prior value? Did it suddenly become 1/10 as strong? No, it wasn't strong to begin with (which is why its price tanked).
You're basically arguing apples and oranges. You're talking about how much a company is worth at a given instant, which of course is related to the market cap (but not the same; when you buy out a company, you don't pay the market cap, as the stock price will change as soon as anyone hears that that company is about to be bought out). The parent was talking about how strong a company is, i.e. how stable it is, how well it can survive bad missteps, etc.
When it comes to the strength of a company, yes, Market Capitalisation is absolutely meaningless.
.com bust, the GFC? You cant run an economy on imaginary assets/money. Market cap is imaginary money, you can bet with it but if the bet goes bad you cannot redeem it for actual money.
Apple bases it's entire market cap on it's share price, now this makes for a high share price but when that share price drops they have nothing to back up the companies value with. No assets, dubious cash flow and so forth. If the bottom fell out of Microsoft's and Apples share price at the same time only MS would survive as they have real assets to offset their debts. Apple's supposed US%50 billion wont last long if all their investors get nervous and the debtors will come knocking at the first hint of trouble as Apple has no real assets that can be auctioned off in the worst case scenario.
Did you learn nothing from the
The GP is right, stock price or market cap is not indication of a companies strength as both can change drastically at a moments notice. They are simply not stable.
Shares are book value + earning potential. Remove earning potential (just 2 bad quarters will do that for you) and all you have to back up your stock price is book value (real assets, this is why US banks fell so hard in the GFC, their real assets were not enough to cover their debts).
It's actually a lot more complex then this but that's the basics. I suspect you're confused enough already.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Microsoft providing binary compatibility?
Don't make me laugh.
Hardware that works perfectly fine in any version of Linux (including all kinds of upgrades) stop working when MS decides to spun a new version of Windows. Driver incomaptibility in the MS world is legendary.