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."

Comments

Re:Name for DotCom bubble 2.0?

[Lennie]

How about 'Social Bubble', it sounds friendly too :-)

Re:capitalism fail

[dkf]

The question is whether someone will force you to invest -- i.e. whether the taxpayers will be made to bail somebody out for $50 bn. That has nothing to do with capitalism, and is just bad government.

There are other ways in which you can end up "forced to invest". An example is where you've got a company (or sector) that is so over-valued that pension funds feel they have to invest in it, otherwise they lag the overall market index. While the fund managers might know that the company is overvalued, there's no way that they're going to say it for fear of getting hounded out of their jobs. (This was one of the engines of the credit bubble.) Do you monitor every trade that your pension fund is doing? I know I don't; I have a real job to do. But what this does mean is that things can go badly wrong with your money.

The basic premise, that things can go wrong which you can do next to nothing about, remains the same. I just don't see that the conclusion you draw from it — that government is the problem — is sustainable. Nor would I say that government is the solution either; that would be foolish. Hanging 10% of all senior financial types on Wall Street from the lampposts of Manhattan to encourage the rest... I'm having problems seeing the down-side of that idea.