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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..."
If Apple one day decides to take that it now has the resources, it can and it will and the Microsoft of today stands no chance of stopping it.
What about Office, Visual Studio, the .NET Framework (LINQ, WPF, WCF, ADO.NET, etc, etc, all designed for business), legacy applications and documents, Active Directory, the ability to run it on hardware by the lowest bidder, etc,
Uh, what?
Let's go through them one at a time:
Microsoft Office
LOSING marketshare virtually every year - do you expect that trend to suddenly change? Microsoft has nothing in Office that would compel a change in that trend, and (though this is speculation) I doubt they do for any future planned releases (whenever those may come out).
Visual Studio
This is a bad example. This is dependent on their other markets. As Microsoft loses ground (albeit slowly) in the client and server market, the Visual Studio market will eventually decline as well.
By now, Microsoft has to be losing ground in that due to losses in the server marketplace (intranet and internet). In the Internet marketplace, the decline should continue quite handily, while the intranet marketplace will be dependent on their continuing decline in the workplace and eventually home marketplaces. Things like Silverlight are their only chances of slowing the defection in this area as well. On the other hand, things like cross platform apps (like the various *nix apps ported to everything else) will help continue the
legacy applications...
Don't have a clue to what you are talking about here - isn't that a marketplace that, by definition, is expected to decline?
Active Directory
Do you mean their ever changing NETBIOS/NETBEUI implementation (with "lotsa shit" cobbled on top)? That too is dependent on them NOT losing marketshare in the server arena. And as it is, those numbers are, and always have been, very skewed - when it comes to workload handled. Windows servers simply do not scale as well as... well... ANY other operating system. So, these gains for competitors will be slower as they can replace Windows servers with a far smaller quantity of non-Windows servers. That's part of what I mean when I say the numbers are skewed - it's not that they are not accurate, it's that they do not accurately portray what's going on. Retire 3 Windows server boxes, install one Linux box.
Regardless, as already mentioned, there are alternatives, such as OpenDirectory and SAMBA (I know a few businesses who dumped their Windows server and simply use a Linux box with a SAMBA server running).
"the ability to run it on hardware from the lowest bidder"
To this one, I say, PUT DOWN THE CRACK PIPE!!!! SERIOUSLY!!!!! What the HELL are you SMOKING? EVERY SINGLE OPERATING SYSTEM, SERVER OR CLIENT, can run on lower end, cheaper hardware than Windows client or server. EVERY ONE OF THEM.
So... any other ideas as to what will save Microsoft?
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!