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:First post

[BitterOak]

First post - IBM ahead of MS? Big suprise considering OS/2 was such a flop in later years :p

Which is too bad, since OS/2 was vastly superior to Windows at the time. So much so, that OS/2 was the OS of choice in many applications where stability and security was important, such as ATMs.

capitalism fail

[Lehk228]

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.

Re:capitalism fail

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is not whether Facebook is worth $50 bn. Whether it fails or not doesn't matter if none of that $50 bn is yours (and if it is, it's your own fault). 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. So in actuality, it's not the current implementation of capitalism that is flawed, but the implementation of government.

Re:capitalism fail

[Opportunist]

The flaw is rooted much deeper. We're not comparing the revenue and industrial strength of companies anymore, we're comparing our expectations. Quite literally. The stock value of a company is tied to the analyst's expectations, not the money they earn. More bluntly, we're comparing whether we will find another idiot to sell those toilet papers to before someone notices their lack of value.

I guess it's obvious that a "honest" company that actually produces and sells goods cannot compete with this.

Re:capitalism fail

[swillden]

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.

I don't see the fail.

The "proper" value of a stock is the net present value of its future dividend stream. Even for stocks that don't pay dividends, you can adjust the idea for increase in book value due to retained earnings. In either case, the value isn't just based on the most recent net revenue figures, it's based on profits, and on the anticipated future profits.

If you dig into these numbers a little more, they don't look all that unreasonable to me. Yeah, okay, IBM and Microsoft are neck-and-neck in market cap even though IBM has total revenues almost 50% higher than Microsoft, but Microsoft actually has greater profits ($19B vs $15B) which should send the cap the other way... except that IBM also has much greater assets. As far as their futures go, both companies are going to be productive and profitable both short-term and long-term, but it's unlikely that either of them is going to experience tremendous growth. So... they really are worth about the same.

Throwing Google into the mix, Google is worth almost as much as the other two, but has smaller revenues and profits ($8B)... so maybe that's the fail? Google also has tremendous opportunity for growth. It's currently raking in the lion's share of on-line advertising revenues in the industry, but those are still just a tiny piece of total advertising expenditures -- and online advertising continues to grow really quickly. Even if Google loses market share (and there isn't really any reason to think they will), the pie they're taking a share of is growing so fast that they have lots of growth ahead of them. And that assumes that none of Google's non-advertising ventures are successful. So, while Google currently has smaller revenues and profits, it also has much better prospects for growth than IBM or Microsoft. Again, I think the market capitalization isn't at all unreasonable.

But what about LinkedIn? Yeah, they may well represent a fail. But Lots of people said that about Google when their IPO went crazy. Investors in LinkedIn are gambling but it's not an entirely unreasonable gamble. LinkedIn doesn't have a lot of revenue, but they have demonstrated that they can generate income from their social network, and it's not unreasonable to believe that they'll find ways to generate a lot more. The bottom line with LinkedIn is that they currently have 100 million account holders. If they can find a way to extract $50 from each of them, on average, over the next 10-15 years they'll have justified their current market cap. That doesn't seem so far-fetched to me. It doesn't seem likely enough that I would buy their stock... but I also refused to buy Google for the same reasons.

Does the market mis-price companies at times? Absolutely. Especially when speculators start inflating bubbles. But I don't really see anything so insane here.

Re:capitalism fail

[blind biker]

The flaw is rooted much deeper. We're not comparing the revenue and industrial strength of companies anymore, we're comparing our expectations. Quite literally. The stock value of a company is tied to the analyst's expectations, not the money they earn. More bluntly, we're comparing whether we will find another idiot to sell those toilet papers to before someone notices their lack of value.

I guess it's obvious that a "honest" company that actually produces and sells goods cannot compete with this.

A couple of years ago I invested in a portfolio of alternative energy companies (top 1 or 2 in solar, wind etc.). ALL of these brought in tons of cash, consistently, quarter after quarter! Since then we had the GUlf of Mexico disaster and Fukushima, and the total amount of extracted oil has certainly not increased. And yet, I am down about 30% on my portfolio value.

After this experience, I learned that there's no point in investing based on fundamentals.

Re:capitalism fail

[Confusador]

If you're investing based on fundamentals and looking at portfolio value after 2 years, you're absolutely right that you're doing it wrong. The question for such an investor should be not about the value but whether the income of those investments is what you thought it will be. If the income is still there, then they will continue to post returns for the forseeable future, hence Buffet's comment that "my preferred holding period is 'forever'."

Yeah, the market will do stupid things in the short term (here meaning periods less than about 10 years), and you can make money based on those movements. Those aren't based on fundamentals, though, so if you're in it for the long haul then a market downturn which isn't based on that data just means it's an opportunity to buy more.

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.

Re:capitalism fail

[khallow]

A couple of years ago I invested in a portfolio of alternative energy companies (top 1 or 2 in solar, wind etc.). ALL of these brought in tons of cash, consistently, quarter after quarter! Since then we had the GUlf of Mexico disaster and Fukushima, and the total amount of extracted oil has certainly not increased. And yet, I am down about 30% on my portfolio value.

These companies are in large part political merchants. Their profit depends on whether they can obtain funding from various governments. With the Democrat loss of the US House of Representatives, the stock market expected these companies to receive considerably less public funding (perhaps factoring in future Republican gains as well) and priced the companies appropriately.

All I can say is that if you missed that, then you weren't investing on the fundamentals.

Re:capitalism fail

[swillden]

It's insane because it's imaginary. It's an imaginary market and it's imaginary value. It's imaginary income. They are also imaginary dollars; imaginary worth imaginary costs. The WHOLE system is imaginary.

Obviously. But so what? What would be real? Gold? A system based on metals would be equally imaginary. The metals might be real, but their value is just as much a collective societal decision as our current approach of believing that audited bits in a computer have value.

The only system that would be truly "real" is barter, where goods with actual value to improve human life are exchanged for other actual goods. However, that system has such insanely high transaction costs that it's simply unworkable. If you're going to have trade, you need a common medium of exchange, and that medium is going to be arbitrary and, to use your word, "imaginary".

Re:capitalism fail

[ChienAndalu]

In a capitalist society you have control over your pension funds.

Re:capitalism fail

[symbolset]

Investors don't give Microsoft's earnings - past or future - full credit because the company has proven itself a spendthrift. They're like an idiot cousin any of us might have who hits it big in the lottery and can be expected to fritter it all away shortly. Except of course that they hit the jackpot every single day. Several times each day. It takes more foolishness than should be humanly possible to be reliably rid of that much excess. Somehow though, the company is gettin' her done.

Numbers on this scale are hard to grasp. To give you an idea of the scale of this foolishness, at a modest 8% APR the $7B Microsoft has burned in their Online Services Division since it last turned a profit would return over half a billion dollars a year - forever. Five hundred and sixty million dollars a year interest is enough money to employ a small US town or a respectable city in India, China or Pakistan, full time for the rest of forever. Add the $8.5 billion they spent on Skype and the money from their other failed acquisitions and it's enough money to migrate the entire US carbon-based electricity system to clean renewable next-generation geothermal energy over a decade just from the interest and have the principal and some capital growth left afterward too. Add the $100B in stock buybacks from the last decade that didn't achieve the goal of lifting the stock price and it's enough money to do those things, wire gigabit fiber to every US home, and fund commercially viable space exploitation too - without ever touching the capital. One Hundred Billion Dollars is the inflation adjusted price of The New Deal. $100B is more money than the entire 2004 Gross Domestic Product of Pakistan when their population was 152 million souls and they commanded the natural resources of their 307,000 square miles of our planet.

All Microsoft has bought with that lost power is the right to throw more bales of money on that fire. It's sick. It's disgusting. It ought not be possible. It is possible though, and perfectly legal. That so many have done so little with so much is appalling. It's offensive. It's wrong. The stock market is not rewarding this behavior, which is right and good.

Facebook Revenue

[phantomfive]

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.

Negligible revenue

[Arancaytar]

valued in the private market for as much as $50 billion, on negligible revenue

1995 called; they want their bubble back.

It's all funny money.

[VortexCortex]

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.

Re:First post

[Hamsterdan]

MacOS 7.x to 9.x was *not* superior to NT. Macs didn't offer multitasking, memory protection and modern stuff until OS X. Better than 3.x, on some points, but not NT (or even 9x)...

Re:Name for DotCom bubble 2.0?

[Lennie]

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

Do you have to be REALLY old...

[Archtech]

... 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...

LOL WAT?

[FatSean]

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.

Re:Name for DotCom bubble 2.0?

[larry bagina]

I'm sure most of us have cut a fart while sitting in a pool or a hot tub or a bath. Urban dictionary calls it an aqua fart, though I've never heard it called anything. Anyhow, when you do it in a hot tub, the heat and chlorine and ass gas combine to form a truly retched stench that lingers.

That's the face book bubble.

Re:Name for DotCom bubble 2.0?

[oztiks]

Facebook, damn that was sooo 2011! The "hard on" the Social Network movie has given the geek world today will eventually go limp. I'd say around the time MS does what it does best. Fuck all their partners when they least expect it, steal a sizable marketshare and borgify the general population.

They sink 240 mil into FB (salting its company value) and then FB lets MS implant their spies throughout the office, setup exclusive ad deals, and put a like button on Bing. Zuckerberg whose supposed to be this visionary doesn't even it coming.

- Take Nokia and factor in Skype. MS has made cell phone carriers obsolete.
- Take Skype and link it with MSN and Hotmail, build a FB import tool (which they could do in house). MS has made FaceBook obsolete.
- Take XBOX, Kinect, link it with PayTV, Skype and BlueRay. MS has just created an all in one black box that does everything for the home.

The history of the IT industry is about to repeat itself. Sell your shares in Apple if you've still gottem.