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

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

[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

[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: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 :-)

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.