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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..."
Buying stock in a company that doesn't pay dividends is just gambling - you're buying in the hope that you can find a chump who'll pay more to buy it off you at some point in the future. You can only make money by selling the stock. Apple isn't unique in this regard: most major tech companies and oil drilling companies don't pay dividends. But to me it just looks like a house of cards. You're just gambling on investor confidence in a company.
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.
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.
Yeah.. but from the summary:
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.
That made me actually read the article and it does not really indicate that Apple has anything earth shattering for enterprise at all. I have not really heard anything either, hence the quietly I guess. All it talks about is how enterprise is "figuring out" how to integrate the iPad. I hardly see that as providing key technology to enterprise which is exactly what the summary and article claims.
At least in 2009 (I haven't looked up 2010)
The Blackberry phones outsold iPhones (revenue and units sold) and as usual, Nokia dwarfs them all (in market share).
Granted Apple has done quite well in the MP3 player market, and with its excellent profit margin it is certainly an extremely successful company. But let's compare Apple (market cap $296 billion) to Exxon Mobil (market cap $377 billion).
Exxon Mobil's 2010 profits of $19 Billion on $285 Billion in revenue completely dwarf Apple's 2010 profit of $6 billion on $36 billion in revenue. Granted Apple has a higher profit margin than Exxon Mobil, but in 2009 Exxon Mobil's profits were greater than Apple's revenue.
Both companies are certainly successful, but I suspect Apple's stock price has more to do with its image than its value.
Apple decided a long time ago when OS X was released) that they wanted to remove the "driver headache" as much as possible - so they ship a massive bunch of printer drivers with OS X, including drivers for ancient stuff (you can even use old LaserWriters), and if they don;t have a driver for it, there's a strong chance they can get it going under CUPS, which also ships ready to run. This does mean that you have 250-300MB of drivers sitting in /Library/Printers, but HD space is cheap, and you can delete them if you want to slim down your install (you can also choose to trim the list during install time if you do a fresh installation).
It's one of the many things I like about OS X. I can plug in a USB drive and have it mount right away, ready to use. Plug the same drive into a Windows box and it has to install something. It only takes a few seconds, but I'm unsure what it's doing - surely it's just a USB mass storage device? Plug in my other memory stick, from a different vendor, and it has to install something else!
Lots of little touches like this all across the OS make it nice to use. I have used Win 7, XP and Vista (ugh to Vista) and they work well enough - there's nothing wrong with them per se, when they're working fine, but I prefer OS X.
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,
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