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Apple Passes Microsoft to Become Second-Largest U.S. Company by Market Capitalization

Grimace said:
This actually means that Apple's stock price is more scrutinized from now on. When you're at the top (at least in a sector) it's hard to find momentum to gain more ground. Microsoft has been flatlined for years. Let's hope the same doesn't happen to AAPL.
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Microsoft has flatlined because they haven't done anything of any significance. Microsoft has just been milking Windows and Office for all it's worth because that's their big money maker.

Apple has been creating new ways to generate revenue with new products, something Microsoft hasn't really done.
 
DougB541 said:
Also, market cap isn't the end all be all judgment of a company. Its a part of the bigger pie. People love investing in Apple though because they are forward thinking. Microsoft has been stagnant in innovation....though they display some awesome stuff they rarely take it to market.
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I was just gonna say that. Seems like people here have no idea what they're even looking at besides APPLE RULES!!! Microsoft has been raking in huge profits year after year and their share prices have remained pretty steady. It's going to take something huge to move their shares up. I get the feeling Apple will start seeing a similar situation.

For what it's worth, I hope Mac never becomes the dominant platform though. I think OS X works MUCH better as a more niche product and I do not want Steve Jobs handling PCs in any way similar to how he's handling the iPhone/iPad situation. And while MS may not have the best track record, they'd be foolish to try anything stupid now considering what they've already had to go through in courts in the past decade and a half.
 
AAPL has a P/E ratio of 21, while the other two are down around 13.

AAPL is the current fad stock.
 
Been watching these prices for a while (via Stocks, on my iPhone, Natch!) and pretty much assuming this was going to happen.

May be a temporary glitch, but it certainly makes the dark days of the mid 90's seem like a long way away ("You use a Mac? I thought they were dead!" being a typical comment at the time).

May not last, never underestimate Redmond!

The other rather amusing thing is, that now that Dell are worth approx. $26 billion by the same measure, Apple have almost got enough cash to buy them outright.*

Take THAT Michael Dell!

Heady times, indeed!

* Yes, I know it doesn't quite work like that, but, what the Hey! It's nice to be smug just occasionally!
 
For those who are soooo happy. WHY!?!?!? The company that makes your favorite electronic devices is now the 2nd largest company by market cap. Why does this make you happy??? I don't get it.
 
I'm not a Windows Fan boy and neither am I an Apple fan boy...

Strickly from an investor's point of view, MS has been MUCH better to there investors than Apple. If you invested the same amount of money in Apple and Microsoft in 1986, your MS shares would be worth FAR more than Apple shares.

So as an investment, MS did really well for the investors. But Apple is showing a very good future....
 
This is a very glaring indicator that it's time to sell your shares and not initiate new positions in AAPL.

It's not that they can't have sustained growth, but market pricing is a quirky thing. It almost never reflects the true value of a company. As a shrewd investor, your job is to get in when everyone is underpricing the company relative to its intrinsic value, and get out when everyone's overvaluing it... and be happy, move on to the next opportunity and not look back worrying about if you sold it on a Tuesday or a Thursday could you have eked out a few more dollars per share.

Price fluctuations for Apple are uncharacteristically volatile for a company of this size. That means a ton of speculation is going on, and more speculation is like molecules being heated up in a balloon. It inflates. So too is market price for AAPL heavily inflated by speculation, and that puts the investor at tremendous risk of loss.

The belief that a stock going up will keep going up is based on a very myopic view of a tiny fraction of market activity, and a lot of technical analysis hooey/voodoo. Institutions that engage in large scale transactions are still keenly aware of the company's actual net assets and cash generating capacity... but they do little to advise you of the perils because they play both sides of the transaction as market makers providing liquidity, exploiting inefficiencies in the market due to information gaps... of which they are always on the winning side.

Apple as a company will continue to do well, but whether or not they'll keep trading at a price that's ten times what their net assets and future cash flows (discounted to net present value)... that's playing with fire, blindfolded.

Be shrewd and find the next AAPL... instead of riding the same boat everyone else is on only to be left holding the bag when the insiders drop out.
 
DougB541 said:
I don't think Microsoft is losing and i don't think Apple has "beat" them either.
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I think it is good to work at where both companies compete and here there has been winners and losers:
I think Apple has beat them in Media Players, Phones and Retail.
Microsoft continues to trounce Apple in desktop productivity software sales and desktop web browser installed base.

Then there are the areas the companies don't compete:
Microsoft has beaten Apple in operating system licences, because Apple doesn't compete.
Microsoft has beaten Apple games consoles, because Apple doesn't compete.

BUT:
Apple has beaten Microsoft in computer sales, because Microsoft doesn't compete.
 
SPUY767 said:
Microsoft hasn't bothered to try anything innovative for years. There is room to grow when you're willing to break new ground instead of resting on your laurels.
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Microsoft competes head to head with Google ( search engine and ads ), Oracle ( relational database ) , Nintendo/Sony in gaming markets as well as what might think they only do Windows versus Mac OS if just watch Apple commercials.

It is almost as much that Microsoft is engaged in too many areas then it is that they are not involved in too few. The bigger problem for Microsoft is that they are looking for a "swing for the fences (hit a ball out of park)" kind of result. Microsoft has their fingers in everything that looks like it might have potential be high volume.

Getting their innovation to market at the right time, in the right amounts has been the bigger problem. There is a bit of lazness, but Apple does that too in certain areas also.
 
adiosjefe said:
For those who are soooo happy. WHY!?!?!? The company that makes your favorite electronic devices is now the 2nd largest company by market cap. Why does this make you happy??? I don't get it.
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Because Americans identify too closely with material acquisitions, what they wear, the music they listen to, the car they drive, etc. Combine that with a competitive need to be right/winner/rich to which society reinforces that the only alternative is wrong/loser/poor, you've got a bunch of Mac heads running around thinking arbitrary daily price volatility actually means something to them, even though the company's daily operations have remained otherwise considerably flatter in comparison.

ShiftyPig said:
AAPL has a P/E ratio of 21, while the other two are down around 13.

AAPL is the current fad stock.
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In other news, P/E ratios are also meaningless. They only tell you what other suckers have paid for a company... whether or not you should pay as much is a different question that the P/E ratio (price to earnings; apples and oranges) cannot measure.
 
BRLawyer said:
MS IS DEAD. AND SO IS GOOGLE.
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Hardly. MS remains stagnant, Google is thriving. Apple kind of does it's own thing. If I was picking a future stock growth winner, I would go with Google.

The future is cloud/wireless/mobile. Google is going gangbusters here while Microsoft is a bit player.

MS has rested on it's Monopoly laurels for so long it is actually quite weak when it comes to competing on even ground. It isn't really going anywhere (up or down). It will be squeezed on the Open end by Google and on the Closed End by the Vertically integrated (wireless) like Apple, RIM, (perhaps HP).
 
Having grew up with Microsoft from the beginning and migrating to Apple because of Microsoft's last decade of complacency, we all know exactly what they are all about the moment and hence they haven't concerned me for a long time. It wasn't a case of "if" but "when" this would happen!

Google is the competition at the moment. They are playing a devious game of trying to stick their fingers in all sorts of pies using terms like "open" and "free" to lure people in. Many think the sun shines out of Googles A*s right now but my gut makes me feel they shouldn't be trusted.

I didn't care much about the way they went about dominating the search business at the time, but that was a mistake and I'm treading more carefully now.

I posted on another blog that I think Google might be comparable to the visitors in the sci-fi show "V", they want to be everyones friend (apart from Apples) but what happens when all these so called partners have helped them dominate in many more fields??
 
wowowWOWOWOWOWO

Wow thats amazing! Can't belive I would be alive to see this day. Regarding other posts about loosing momentum...i think not. Not bc I'm an apple fanboy but because you loose momentum when you stop innovating. If you release the same product over and over again you will obviously loose momentum. Microsoft is so huge, they go into everything from Databases, Operating Systems, Hardware (to some extent), Games, Consoles, Web Technologies, Servers, etc etc. That all happened in the 90's and thats why they grew so quickly. Since then they have only come out with updates and mere improvements, thats why they lost momentum.

If Apple keeps rolling out with new products, different products, rest assure their market cap is limitless. BTW I don't regard the iPad as a dif product, its an overly enlarged iTouch. Which is good to capture certain markets but I feel it will cannibalize their other products more.
 
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