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."

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM is worth more to the U.S. government then INTEL, Apple, and Microsoft combined.

And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Colin Smith]

So IBM will be number 1 soon.

Really though. This isn't news for nerds.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[Billly Gates]

Macs are professional machines. The Power macs cost about $3,000 and are used as scientific workstations, and advanced video editing. Smaller businesses use Macs in Europe and run Office on them. Especially businesses that do design.

True they are leaving their roots but Macs are popular in business and where I used to work at the Anchorage School District, they have like 30,000 macs in use in both servers and classrooms.

For the first time since MAY

[md65536]

What happened to the last time this happened?
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/22/0232216/ibm-now-officially-worth-more-than-microsoft [slashdot.org]

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

I always find this a little absurd. Steve Jobs said it best: "We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose." The same basic sentiment goes here. The fact that Apple and IBM are doing better than Microsoft doesn't mean Microsoft is in trouble. They're making more money than ever, despite slashdot predictions of doom and gloom continuing since they made a fraction of what they do now.

That doesn't mean Microsoft isn't in trouble but there's really nothing about "not being the richest in the world" that means "dying".

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[BBCWatcher]

If you believe in rational markets -- I do, if the time horizon is long enough -- the market is simply valuing the respective companies according to the net present value of their expected after-tax profit streams. (That's an oversimplification but only slightly.) Looking at profit growth [fool.com], IBM has outpaced Microsoft for several years running now. If the market simply extrapolates that trend forward, at some point IBM's and Microsoft's valuations had to cross.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

That's a very good question, and it should lead you to consider that maybe "aluminum case and a 50% markup" isn't all there is to Apple's success. But it probably won't.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[bky1701]

And a PC that runs rings around an Apple-branded PC costs about 2k$. Seriously, when I built this computer, I cut a lot of corners, and it was still far higher in every spec than the best Apple had on the market. You're paying easily 30-40% of the price just for it being an iDevice.

"Macs are popular in business"

Graphics, music, and some small forays into movie production (although the real work still happens on Windows and the processing on Linux). Business-business, that being, engineering, finance, healthcare, point of sale, etc, still are Windows or Linux only clubs. For very, very good reason.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[BBCWatcher]

Apple's machine runs Apple's software. Something else doesn't. The value is in the software (and the content), customers recognize that, and so does Wall Street. It's really quite simple. The number that Wall Street assigns to the value of a company is far, far removed from the number of gigahertz in that company's products. Apple has found multiple winning formulas in its products, while Microsoft is struggling to deliver compelling products right now.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[symbolset]

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.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[symbolset]

If you want to argue with me on this point then do the math. Look at what the investment was paid in then, and what it would be worth now if Microsoft had held it to the present day. Only then, if your numbers disagree with what I said, call me a liar. Or trust me, you can't do it. I did the math and if your figures disagree, you've read them wrong somehow. That one investment, if held, would now be most of Microsoft's market cap. Microsoft has fared well on their core markets for a long time - but we knew how to do WYSIWYG document editing before they even bought the word processing package we know as Word. And long before then, word processing was a solved problem, much as spreadsheets and presentations were.

What has Microsoft got to give but a halt to progress to preserve their control? Diddly. Is that enough? Maybe, if we're not watching.