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IBM Unseats Microsoft As Second Most Valued Tech Company
First time accepted submitter FlatEric521 writes "The BBC is reporting that for the first time since 1996 IBM's market value has exceeded Microsoft's. The values cap a sustained period in which IBM's share price has moved steadily upward as Microsoft's has generally been in decline. Of course, Apple is still the #1 company by far."
IBM is worth more to the U.S. government then INTEL, Apple, and Microsoft combined.
Steve, the legs of that chair sticking through your office window say otherwise.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Apple is the largest tech company followed by IBM and Microsoft, if measured by how much the stock market thinks each company is valued at. It is a completely meaningless metric that does not say anything about either company. The stock market is detached from the real world and how well a company's stock is doing is not proportional to how well that company is doing.
Football Odds
What happened to the last time this happened?
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/22/0232216/ibm-now-officially-worth-more-than-microsoft
It's extremely difficult for a major company to sustain its business leadership after its founder leaves. IBM was fortunate they had a son at the helm who was every bit as smart as his father. After the son the company lost its way but then found a new, better path after huge, painful adjustments. That's the exception, though. Apple had a near-death experience losing Steve Jobs, but the founder returned and put Apple back on track. It'll be interesting to see what happens now that Tim Cook is in charge, but we won't know the impact for several years. Likewise, Microsoft has yet to prove it can prosper in its post-founder era, and that experiment has been running a lot longer now. True, Ballmer has been with Microsoft a long time, but he's no Bill Gates, Thomas Watson (Jr. or Sr.), Steve Jobs, or even Lou Gerstner/Sam Palmisano.
Apple's P/E ratio is only 15. On what exactly do you base this prediction?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Lacked vision? Who would have thought that people would have been so stupid to buy en-masse the mp3 player with the worse usability among all those on the market? (unless you had a missing arm, that's it) Who would have thought that later people would buy en-masse a phone that was good at everything else but making phone calls? at a premium price and locked down? Come on...
Oh, yeah. They should have bought into Plays For Now, or Zune and they didn't. What fools they are! They should have grasped that brass ring when it was before them, and now they could be enjoying the rapture of Windows Phone's one percent market share. after having sold their soul to the devil to get there like Nokia is doing.
Um, no. Not just no, but Fuck no. Are you fucking kidding? I saw this movie and it doesn't end well. It's a sole survivor flick where even the survivor is tortured.
But it's different now because Microsoft has grown warm and fuzzy.
Fuck you. We've had that story a thousand times, and it's a faustian bargain every time. The devil treats only when it's his advantage to do so. Make a deal with him, and he gets your soul. That's how it works.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Apple's strategy for the last decade has been to ride the cusp of the wave of commoditisation. They identify a market that is about to be overrun by commodity products, enter it at the point when they can get commodity prices from their suppliers but still charge premium prices to their customers, and then move on to a new market while keeping a small share at the expensive end of the newly commoditised market. Home computers, laptops, portable media player, smartphones and tablets have all followed this trend. The problem that Apple now has - and the reason that they're resorting to lawsuits to slow down other tablet makers - is that they don't have the next market identified and they don't have a product ready for it.
This strategy is very profitable, but only as long as they keep moving forward. Apple's market cap is based on the fact that their net income has increased by a huge amount year on year. As soon as it stops increasing, or the rate of increase slows, it will collapse.
It remains to be seen whether post-Jobs Apple can keep this going. Steve Jobs was always good at identifying this kind of market (look at PDO and WebObjects, for example), but it wasn't until he returned to Apple that he was really good at exploiting them, and I suspect that this was largely due to other people on the management team. I'm not sure that Apple still has the expertise to both identify and exploit a new market.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Lots of people add an aluminium case. They just don't add the rest. For example, my last 3 Mac laptops have all had a backlit keyboard - if I use it in low light, I can still see the keys. The last two came with MagSafe power connectors. I managed to kick the power cable on my ThinkPad and drop it from the top of a chest of drawers (to its credit, it survived). I kick the power cable of my MacBook Pro regularly, and it doesn't have a problem. The screen on this machine is the best I've seen on any laptop. It's bright enough to use in direct sunlight and isn't one of the horrible glossy screens that seem so popular elsewhere. FireWire 800 means that I can daisy-chain a couple of external hard drives and still get good performance from them - when I was doing video editing I had one for the source material and one for scratch renders, and even my G4 PowerBook was pretty fast in that configuration. ThunderBolt means that I don't have to worry so much about expandability - I can plug in PCIe devices externally, and I can even drive two external displays if I'm going to be in the same place for a while. The trackpad can simultaneously track 4 fingers, so multitouch gestures work nicely.
My last MacBook Pro had four years of daily use before being retired to less strenuous uses and I expect the new one to last as long. My ageing PowerBook still works, although it doesn't get much use anymore.
As to the 50% markup, let's see what a similar spec machine costs from Lenovo. The ThinkPad W520 seems to be about the same spec as the one I bought. I need to bump the CPU up to 2.2GHz from the stock 2GHz to make that the same. The display is only 1600x900, while mine is 1680x1050, but it has an option of 1920x1080 for £144 more. We'll go with the cheaper one since it has an nVidia GPU with 2GB of RAM while the Mac has an ATI GPU with 1GB of RAM. I'll leave it with the stock 4GB of RAM, since I upgraded mine to 8GB with third-party RAM (buying RAM from laptop makers seems expensive from anyone, but Apple is probably the worst in this regard). The ThinkPad doesn't have the option of a 256GB SSD, so I'll go with the 128GB SSD for now. The price is now £100 more than I paid for my MacBook Pro, yet:
If Apple is adding a 50% markup, then Lenovo must be adding at least 75%. On the plus side for the ThinkPad, it does have ExpressCard (my last MBP did as well - I never used it) and eSATA (less useful to me than FW800, because I can't daisy chain external disks with it, I can only plug one in at a time). It also has USB3, which may become useful at some point in the future, .
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Actually, downturn markets are great for companies like Apple, as their success in the last couple years should demonstrate. You see, in times like this, people cannot afford or feel they cannot afford real luxury items: vacations, expensive cars, bigger houses, pools, early retirement, so on. But people still like to treat themselves to a luxury. Apple is right in the sweetspot for this: pretty much everybody with a job can afford an Apple product or two, and they will sacrifice other things to get one just to feel like they have luxuries.
It is called the lipstick principle. You can read about it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/fashion/01SKIN.html?pagewanted=all