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IBM Now Officially Worth More Than Microsoft
liqs8143 writes with news that IBM's market cap has surpassed Microsoft's, making it the second most valuable tech company. When the market closed on Friday, IBM was valued at $207.52B, while Microsoft was valued at $206.52B.
"At one point during the PC era, Microsoft's value climbed three times higher than IBM's. Apparently, this has been a long two decades in Armonk, N.Y., but Microsoft also is no longer the beast it once was. The guard is changing. Besides Apple, there is also Google. While Google is valued at about $170.59 billion, less than the other three, its $31 billion in annual revenue is half of Microsoft's $69 billion and less than a third of IBM's $101 billion. Waiting in the wings is Facebook, which has been valued in the private market for as much as $50 billion, on negligible revenue."
First post - IBM ahead of MS? Big suprise considering OS/2 was such a flop in later years :p
So i did well into put my assets on IBM back in 1994?, take that carl!
"Facebook, which has been valued in the private market for as much as $50 billion, on negligible revenue"
have we came up with a name for the new bubble?
and this is why the current implementation of capitalism is fatally flawed, it is founded on fraud, deception, and innuendo. facebook is valued at $50 billion dollars even though it makes very little money and will wither and die just like every other hit social network when something else comes out.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
In case anyone was wondering, Facebook's 'negligible revenue' is approximately $1billion, with profits of around $300million. Sources at this point seem to be mainly rumor, and vary, but are in the same range.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Facebook claims they have 500 million users. That's $10 per user.
If I paid you $10, would you sign up for my new social networking site? We could do away with Facebook.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Now IBM can afford by buy back OS/2 and make a smartphone version that features Watson running on CIGS solar cells.
Or hunter-gatherers.
Anyway, they actually made something which is the basic necessity for life.
Then there were middlemen, wholesalers, and retailers of grain. They made more than farmers.
Then there were big industries and steel. They also made more than farmers, but at least they were making something.
Then came companies like Apple made something with that steel (and plastic). They earn a lot. And IBM earns a lot for, basically, consulting.
But, most mind-blowing of all is Facebook, which is set to be huge for nothing other than letting people update their statuses.
Meanwhile, there are people unemployed.
If you've got the modern economy figured out, feel free to respond.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Longtime Microsoft watcher Paul Thurrott just blogged his ideas for fixing Microsoft and getting it back into the game against Apple, Google, and Facebook. Start by spinning off Xbox, he opines. Then delayer the idea-killing corporate bureaucracy, starting with Ballmer...
1995 called; they want their bubble back.
...who seem to be omnipresent on /. will be thrilled at this news!
[DucksFlyingChair] To be fair though, I suspect it's more due to Ballmer's incompetence than any real indication of success on IBM's part! [/DucksFlyingChair] ;)
I'm honest enough to admit I lie to myself.
There is a bit of belly button lint that is valued at over $900 nonillion dollars! That's more money than there is in the world, many times over! I would say her naval lint is priceless, but I may consider letting someone else farm my girlfriend's belly button, If they transfered the world's wealth to me, many times over (to have destroyed -- that shit's evil, and the world would just make more money).
Remember when Yahoo's stock value jumped because MS tried to buy them? Did you notice how much better Yahoo's service was during this time? Remember how their stock price fell drastically after the MS buy-out fell through? Remember how Yahoo's service just turned to utter shit at the same time? No? Right, because it stayed the same. These companies stock prices and Market Caps mean jack shit... it's all decimal numbers attached to feelings -- if more people feel good about having a larger number of a company's stock, then it's "worth" more, irregardless of the actual value of the products and services the companies make... It's all based on emotions! Feelings!!!
Now, say you're AT&T. Your stock price is worth X because of your profit and loss statement. If you spend some profit to make your company worth more -- improved speeds and reliability -- then your stock price will fall because the investors see that you are not bringing in as much profit.
Yes yes, there are Analysts, this is an over-simplification, the actual value does weigh in somewhat, but the feelings do more so -- This really does hold true in most cases. Ergo, one reason the US has shitty Internet is because of the funny-money market.
Granted, I feel that MS should be worth less than IBM, even though I haven't seen a single IBM brand device anywhere in my house for years... Even though I don't like or own Apple products, I feel that they should be worth more than MS because their fanbois are loud.
Is it any wonder that the feeling based values relate directly to the public's feelings and thus directly are reflected in the stock market?
How are you feeling about the banking/mortgage industry? About as well as they are doing, eh? Wonder why that is... It's a shame we didn't learn our lesson about the funny-money market the first time... I once showed that my neighbor has spent enough money playing the lottery to have purchased things they talk about buying if they win -- C'est la vie, people are dumb.
IBM Now Officially Worth More Than Microsoft
But is it worth more than LinkedIn?
Wut? Why and since when is Apple first? The only thing they make that's popular is the iPhone (and nowadays to a lesser extent, the iPod), no?
Graphics aside, it's no secret that there's been a big change from a mantra of "quality, quality, quality" to "content, content, content"... and non-related content at that. A PlayStation did one thing - it played video games. The PS3 can do nearly everything... even function as a computer if you don't upgrade the firmware.
In prior years, it would take you at LEAST a week to finish a campaign on any respectable video game. These days, you can finish a video game completely in two days. Then spend five more days fiddling with the "bonus content". If they spent more time developing a good story as opposed to unlockables, that race may accelerate again. Developers aren't struggling to use the processing power they have at their disposal. There's no reason for innovation at this particular time.
We need to get back to a time where developing solid and expansive CORE content -- not extras -- was what mattered.
I remember when I was a retail software sales goon, going to an IBM presentation for their voice recognition software back in 1995. At the time there was a lot of big Windows 95 stuff going on and the IBM guy was really keen to make sure that people knew IBM was a "real" computer company, and one thing that has always stuck with me was him saying that IBM was the biggest company in that market, and if was so big that if you took the next three companies and added their value together - IBM was still worth more.
Never found out of that was exactly true, but at the time I remember it put IBM in a new perspective for me - I just knew them as a company that made a bunch of weeny boring unpopular PC software packages and did some stuff in the hardware space. The reality seems to be that they're this big, massively entrenched company that has hooks freakin' everywhere.
IBM Now Officially Worth More Than Microsoft
Wasn't that true all the time?
Oh, we are talking about money...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Not hardware, nor proprietary software. Indicates where the real value is over time.
... to read the headline as "...IBM's market cap has once again surpassed Microsoft's..."?
Don't forget that IBM was a $70 billion turnover company (back when that was worth quite a lot) whose chairman regularly appeared at the shareholders' meeting and apologized for any inadvertent growth during the past year? That was because everyone knew if IBM grew any bigger the DoJ was committed to dismembering it as a monopoly.
At that point, there was no Microsoft.
IBM basically created Microsoft as a defence against the mortal strategic threat posed to it by the Apple Lisa. Yes, that's right: to protect itself against an utterly imaginary threat, IBM itself created the only serious competitor it would have for the next 30 years. Hmmm, maybe not as dumb as you might think... at least it got the DoJ off its back and onto Microsoft's...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
No... Stock price is not money, it's perception.
Yes. It was valued at $50 billion by Goldman Sachs and as we know Goldman Sachs are experts at running little pump & dump schemes. Coincidentally, Goldman are managing the floatation. What a shock their valuation was!
Official? Who declared it official? Since when have market valuations been "official"?
Always. They have the worlds largest patent portfolio. They own a good chunk of modern computing in one way or another.
Oh you mean as valued by the fake made up market stats they are now valued more? Big deal... Those numbers don't mean shit.
IBM sold off all of these components and its still biger than microsoft Hard drive division Printer division. Embedded division Federal division Personal computer division Network division Slashdot need to use IBM's POWER servers so they will stop getting slashdoted... POWER servers can process at least 3 times the amount of information as any intel server. All of those cell towers across the country, they have PowerPC in them. All the routers sifting through your communications, they have PowerPC in them. All the military weapons, yes PowerPC. why buy three INTEL servers, when i can buy just one POWER7 server. If you need masive amounts of processing power, you'll use POWER/PowerPC {xBox360/Play stations 3/Wii}
It's quite interesting to compare other numbers, Wolfram qives a quick glimpse - http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=apple+ibm+microsoft+google+
I think the most interesting is that the market capitalization isn't correlated with the net revenue of the company - where logically it should be. This may be because of the expectations about a company future earnings, and higher capitalization is a bubble created by investors believing that given company will earn more in future. If this is true, then Apple is now very overpriced, as it's worth 300b with net income 20b. The IBM and Microsoft are worth about 200b, but IBM has net income 15b, and Microsoft 20b - I think this reflects investors' beliefs/analyses about the future growth of the companies.
This thoughts may be very trivial to someone with economic backround, but I'm just a computer science student, and it's interesting for me (and I suppose it may be to others without such background) to analyse market indexes about tech companies that way.
Another thing that I've just 'discovered' is that the 'P/E rato' row on the Wolfram table means the market capitalization divided by annual net income - so this number reflects how many years investors would have to wait until the company would pay back what it's currently worth. E.g. in case of Apple P/E is 15, so if you buy a share worth 15$, then you could get 1$ per year max (in case where company pays all net income to market owners, instead of e.g. more investments).
I'm wondering what more those inices can tell about the expected future of companies. For example, if the P/E index is twice higher for Google than for Microsoft, does it mean that market believes (or analyses shows) Google's net revenue will grow twice faster than Microsoft's? If so, are we able to tell how many year have to pass for the Google to surpass Microsoft in net revenue/ market cap.
A company who makes billions in hardware devices and the supporting facilities now is worth more than just a software company.
News at 11.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
The government is going to bail out facebook? Me thinks we've got someone upset with recent elections who wants to inject his anti-government rants into this thread. Government does need some fixing...better regulation of financial markets for one. But your screed comes across as someone who wants to tear it all down.
Blar.
P/E is a backwards number. In your example, Apple earned $1 last year - but that is not what it's going to earn next year.
P/E is a way to compare two different companies quickly. For example, a company with 1,000 shares at $10 to a company with 100 share at $100 that made the same profit would have the same P/E ratio. One can compare Berkshire Hathaway ($118,045 per share) with Microsoft ($24).
A better example may be to compare IBM, Google and Ford to get a better idea of how these things work. In some ways, Ford is a larger company. More employees, more revenue, etc. then the 4 companies you just gave. On the other hand, Ford's profit margin and it's expectation for growth is larger. So Ford's P/E is 8. People are putting a higher value on last year's earnings for MSFT then for Ford.
So, why is this? 2 big reasons.
First, future growth. By the way, this does not mean people think Google is going to grow 2x faster then MSFT. The growth curve of most companies are exponential [very fast growth] which then levels off.
Second is risk/uncertainty The riskier a company is the lower it's P/E ratio.
I hope this helps.
And to answer your last question
No... Stock price is not money, it's perception.
And perception is money.
sic transit gloria mundi
Waiting in the wings is Facebook, which has been valued in the private market for as much as $50 billion, on negligible revenue
Gee, where have I heard that one before? I forget. Nevermind. BUY BUY BUY!!!
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
If I remember correctly, it was cooperative, not preemptive, multitasking. When things were going well you wouldn't notice the difference. Much less effective when dealing with a non-cooperating task.
Earlier versions of Windows may have been similar.
After the IPO, if you don't jump in, and Facebook's value increases 2000% (to 100 trillion,) you will have missed out on the potential upside of that investment. The only downside is the liability of your initial investment, but it seems beyond the point given the extreme likelihood of the 2000% scenario.
Any thoughts of not wanting to reward Zuckerberg and the other twenty-something billionaires isn't an actual rational motivation either; they deserve to be rewarded for taking the initial risks of starting the business. Your mechanism of the "fork" which would have more egalitarian utility (not including spying for free, more democratizing, yadda yadda) is too sensible, and moreover beyond the actual point which is to enrich us early investors who now have a stake in this particular implementation.
Let me be the 351st person to say that I for one welcome our new software and service overlords.
Back in the 80's, Bill Gates & company said IBM was too much "suits", and didn't know what the customers wanted, or how to deliver it. Kind of looks like MS has done the same thing, sit back and just let Windows run the roost, and now they are behind the times. Tablet computing, MS doesn't have a clue. Phones, MS doesn't have a clue. Windows, or more importantly, the home bound PC, is on its way out and MS is about 5 years behind the times.
- who is the #1 tech company?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
how many of you read the excerpt from G Morgensons book in the biz section of the N Y Times to day?
rating a compnay on what clueless investors do is like rating programmers on how well they headhunter said the they could
The government wouldn't need to bail out companies if oligopolies were not permitted. Oligopolies are anti-competition, and create town- and state-level dependencies.
The excuses to allow oligopolies are usually weak.
Table-ized A.I.
ummm nah... let them burn...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
500 million users * $10 per user = $5 billion...
The "proper" value of a stock is the net present value of its future dividend stream.
If by "future dividend stream" you mean free cash flow then you are quite correct.
IBM is once again, Officially Worth More Than Microsoft.
Balmer is killing MS, and it's because he is too busy chasing shinys.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
consumerism != capitalism
Slashdot = Sarcasm
It took many years for the human race to go from wooden torches to LED Flashlights... Not quite as many to go from the wheeled cart behind a beast of burden to a modern car/truck/train/cargo plane... Graphene is not that old, as it is understood now (almost 100 years known, but only 7 or 8 as a single atom thick 'sheet'... The applications and 'announcements' are often mixed with attempts to get large funding, more than development of a real probability, at this time. But, given proper time and application of techniques, graphene will change the way many things are done. People are too used to the idea of instant gratification, and want to see results 'yesterday'... I am surprised how many are not demanding see through aluminum windows. (Scotty knew about them)... The stages of the development are at the basic 'find' level. You find the usage... and possibility You set up the usage and demonstrate it... Then, hopefully, you find a profitable way to manufacture and sell it. If you can do the first two, and not the last.. you have nothing. That is the stage all forget about... when wanting instant gratification.