Microsoft Briefly Overtakes Apple as Most Valuable US Company (khaleejtimes.com)

Microsoft briefly overtook Apple as the world's most valuable listed company, fulfilling what it almost did eight years ago and adding a feather on the cap on CEO Satya Nadella. From a report: Redmond, Washington-headquartered Microsoft had a market cap of $753.34 billion, beating out the iPhone maker's $746.82 billion in intra-day trade on Friday at the Nasdaq in New York. Apple, however, regained control at the close. According to the Nasdaq website, Apple's market cap rose back up to $817.58 billion. Right behind it is Microsoft, which also increased to $791.19 billion. Tech companies have undergone some rough times recently. In particular, the so-called FAANG group -- Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google (Alphabet) -- had, as at November 20, combined market cap losses of over $1.02 trillion from their recent highs.

Comments

Not a surprise, really

[LynnwoodRooster]

Microsoft's stock gains have been slower and much more consistent - and the volatility of the stock is also a lot lower. Of course, MSFT makes most of its revenue from business-based revenue streams which are much less affected by consumer confidence/consumer purchasing, so it should be less volatile. Long-term, MSFT and AMZN will be the most valuable tech companies because of their dominant positions that tend to be more independent of consumer trends.

Re:No more MS

[LynnwoodRooster]

Red Hat disagrees with you.

Re:I've never heard anyone ever claim Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure what point you're trying to make.

- Windows has 87% of the desktop/laptop market share;
- while AWS is still massively in the lead in the cloud infrastructure market, it is losing market share to Azure;
- Office 365 overtook Google Apps in the cloud applications market three years ago;
- and C# and ASP .NET are massively used in the enterprise sector.

Microsoft is a pretty solid business.

Re:Valuable, according to whom??

[LynnwoodRooster]

I think a strong case could be made that the massive rise in personal computing and the Internet came about precisely because of Windows. A pretty-much ubiquitous OS that was easy enough for most people to use allowed developers - hardware and software alike - to target a single platform, and that allowed rapid deployment and expansion of technology into the consumer and business worlds. This isn't about "Windows it the best/worst", this is about a pretty-much standardized platform emerging and allowing most technical advancements to target a single platform.