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Apple Passes $300B Market Cap, 2nd In the World
An anonymous reader writes "In May, Apple surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization to become the second largest company (by that measure) in the world. Today, with its shares riding high, Apple passed $300 billion in market cap, entering a club of two along with the still-gigantic ExxonMobile. And investors' targets could bring Apple beyond where Exxon is now (though Exxon continues to soar as well). Perhaps Wall Street is catching on that, despite the discontinuation of their underused Xserve, Apple is in fact becoming one of the key tech providers to enterprise, a position that even a year ago seemed laughable. If you consider the iPad to be a PC (which enterprise increasingly is), then suddenly you realize that Apple is expected to climb to 12% market share in 2011. Plus, of course, they have those little things called iPods, and iTunes..."
"We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose." --Steve Jobs
All Apple had to do was stop trying to climb the fence to play in Microsofts yard, and apply some ingenuity to marketing and manufacturing. They've done well in these regards. You don't need to be an iFanboi to tip your hat here.
Apple will never replace Microsoft in the workplace, because they don't want to, there's not nearly as much money in it as replacing Microsoft in the home.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
High market capitalization doesn't mean anything other than people are interested in owning a piece of this company. It doesn't mean that the company is successful, or even profitable. It's a common fallacy (some would argue, THE common fallacy) that stock price has anything to do with the underlying company's intrinsic worth.
It's the same problem that sacked the mortgage market. The system is set up so that the bits of a company, called stock (or the mortgage) are entirely unconnected to the supposed underlying item of value, which is the company itself (building, property). With the stock market, people don't expect company dividends (anymore), and, even more bizarre, the supposed owners of the company aren't liable for any company crimes. Market capitalization is as meaningful as Twitter trends are.
That being said, it's interesting from a purely social point of view.
I don't respond to AC's.
Nice isn't it? One year ago we bought a couple of macbook pros for some employees. Up until then, I haven't had much experience with apple computers. I entered the hostname of our high volume network printer, osx detected it propperly over the network and configured the appropriate drivers. It even detected the additionally installed hardware modules, a thing the vendor's driver for windows is not capable of (duh?).
Later i found out who is the main contributor of CUPS; Apple. The "Common Unix Printing System" is really really userfriendly once it gets the propper user interfaces and hardware detection (which OSX provides). CUPS with gnome is not bad but can't be compared to what OSX is capable of.
Cheers,
-S
Does anyone else remember when AOL had a market cap of $222 billion, because the Internet was the new big thing and AOL, with its acquisition of Netscape and Time Warner, was sure to dominate that space forever?
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2010/fortune/1002/gallery.biggest_losers.fortune/8.html
Yeah.
If Steve Jobs so much as sneezes Apple loses 20 percent of its market cap. Not because he's so essential, but because investors want to get out ahead of the gigantic Hype bubble deflating. We've seen this before. When will people learn?