IBM Now Officially Worth More Than Microsoft 295
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."
capitalism fail (Score:5, Insightful)
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The question is not whether Facebook is worth $50 bn. Whether it fails or not doesn't matter if none of that $50 bn is yours (and if it is, it's your own fault). 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. So in actuality, it's not the current implementation of capitalism that is flawed, but the implementation of government.
Re:capitalism fail (Score:5, Interesting)
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:capitalism fail (Score:4, Insightful)
In a capitalist society you have control over your pension funds.
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Only if you directly control them - which most people in any society don't have time to do unless their day job is as a pension fund manager.
Otherwise you have to trust someone. Sure, there may be a pension fund out there with specific guidelines that require investment in only green companies, or only companies that aren't Facebook. But - - - - there's no guarantee in a capitalist society that there will be a given company that caters to your specific wants.
So no, overall I don't think most people have
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huh? how the hell is that supposed to work? You can't stop a company growing in size. Imagine if an IBM or a Microsoft came up with the next generation of "ipod" like technologies. The type of tech that turned apple from a liquidation waiting to happen in the 90s to the most valuable tech company today. The company would double in size and exceed any market cap imposed by government.
In the same way that you can't prevent companies forming cartels, using child labour or acting as monopolies?
Not if you leave it to the free market to decide, you can't.
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Back here in reality, that's not the question at all.
Facebook won't be bailed out by government when people have drifted to another social networking site, just like Myspace wasn't bailed out, and just like AOL wasn't.
LOL WAT? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Blatant +5 strawman
Re:capitalism fail (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
A couple of years ago I invested in a portfolio of alternative energy companies (top 1 or 2 in solar, wind etc.). ALL of these brought in tons of cash, consistently, quarter after quarter! Since then we had the GUlf of Mexico disaster and Fukushima, and the total amount of extracted oil has certainly not increased. And yet, I am down about 30% on my portfolio value.
After this experience, I learned that there's no point in investing based on fundamentals.
Re:capitalism fail (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're investing based on fundamentals and looking at portfolio value after 2 years, you're absolutely right that you're doing it wrong. The question for such an investor should be not about the value but whether the income of those investments is what you thought it will be. If the income is still there, then they will continue to post returns for the forseeable future, hence Buffet's comment that "my preferred holding period is 'forever'."
Yeah, the market will do stupid things in the short term (here meaning periods less than about 10 years), and you can make money based on those movements. Those aren't based on fundamentals, though, so if you're in it for the long haul then a market downturn which isn't based on that data just means it's an opportunity to buy more.
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Buy low sell high. Too many people sell low and buy high because it is rising only to finally sell when it is low.
Yeah, the market will do stupid things in the short term (here meaning periods less than about 10 years), and you can make money based on those movements.
I love a stupid market. It's how a few become rich. If everyone did the exact same thing, the market would move very little and it would be hard to make a buck. As the market moves up, the sell orders would pour in correcting the rise. As the market moves down the buy orders would pour in correcting the fall.
Go counter to the market. Buy during a selloff and sell during a bubble. It isn't
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Go counter to the market. Buy during a selloff and sell during a bubble. It isn't difficult.
It sounds easy, the problem is picking the right time. Look at the history of Microsoft [yahoo.com]: In the two years between 1995 and 1997 their stock price more than tripled from ~$5 to ~$15. Then it went from $15 to more than $50 between 1997 and 1999. And then it quickly fell back to ~$35 the next year. It hasn't materially exceeded that last price at any time since and has in fact slowly lost almost 30% of its value since then.
The trouble is that it's far too easy to see a bubble and sell Microsoft for $15 in 1997
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First, find some books by Benjamin Graham. Their a good read. He had a famous student you might of heard of - Warren Buffett.
Second, realize that in the short term the stock market is a voting machine - or a beauty pageant. In the long run [5+ years] it is a weighing machine.
Third, realize that the past is gone and that you are buying a company on it's future performance. Or, as Yogi Berra said "Prediction is very hard, especially about the future".
Re:capitalism fail (Score:5, Insightful)
A couple of years ago I invested in a portfolio of alternative energy companies (top 1 or 2 in solar, wind etc.). ALL of these brought in tons of cash, consistently, quarter after quarter! Since then we had the GUlf of Mexico disaster and Fukushima, and the total amount of extracted oil has certainly not increased. And yet, I am down about 30% on my portfolio value.
These companies are in large part political merchants. Their profit depends on whether they can obtain funding from various governments. With the Democrat loss of the US House of Representatives, the stock market expected these companies to receive considerably less public funding (perhaps factoring in future Republican gains as well) and priced the companies appropriately.
All I can say is that if you missed that, then you weren't investing on the fundamentals.
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The stock value of a company is tied to the analyst's expectations, not the money they earn.
The money a company earns is just a proxy for expected future earnings. Investments have always been based on expectations. And what else should it be based on? It doesn't matter if a company has made lots of money before -- the whole point of investing is that you think it will make money some time after you invest.
Re:capitalism fail (Score:4, Interesting)
Investors don't give Microsoft's earnings - past or future - full credit because the company has proven itself a spendthrift. They're like an idiot cousin any of us might have who hits it big in the lottery and can be expected to fritter it all away shortly. Except of course that they hit the jackpot every single day. Several times each day. It takes more foolishness than should be humanly possible to be reliably rid of that much excess. Somehow though, the company is gettin' her done.
Numbers on this scale are hard to grasp. To give you an idea of the scale of this foolishness, at a modest 8% APR the $7B [businessinsider.com] Microsoft has burned in their Online Services Division since it last turned a profit would return over half a billion dollars a year - forever. Five hundred and sixty million dollars a year interest is enough money to employ a small US town or a respectable city in India, China or Pakistan, full time for the rest of forever. Add the $8.5 billion they spent on Skype and the money from their other failed acquisitions [wikipedia.org] and it's enough money to migrate the entire US carbon-based electricity system to clean renewable next-generation geothermal energy over a decade just from the interest and have the principal and some capital growth left afterward too. Add the $100B in stock buybacks from the last decade that didn't achieve the goal of lifting the stock price and it's enough money to do those things, wire gigabit fiber to every US home, and fund commercially viable space exploitation too - without ever touching the capital. One Hundred Billion Dollars is the inflation adjusted price of The New Deal [wikipedia.org]. $100B is more money than the entire 2004 Gross Domestic Product of Pakistan when their population was 152 million souls and they commanded the natural resources of their 307,000 square miles of our planet.
All Microsoft has bought with that lost power is the right to throw more bales of money on that fire. It's sick. It's disgusting. It ought not be possible. It is possible though, and perfectly legal. That so many have done so little with so much is appalling. It's offensive. It's wrong. The stock market is not rewarding this behavior, which is right and good.
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We're not comparing the revenue and industrial strength of companies anymore, we're comparing our expectations.
The market has been this way my entire adult life (I'm 41). There are a lot of good stock market themed movies from the 80s that demonstrate this nicely ( I like the one with Christian Bale as the serial killer).
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The flaw is rooted much deeper. We're not comparing the revenue and industrial strength of companies anymore, we're comparing our expectations.
It's a feature not a bug. It makes no sense to value, for purchase by us, a good or service any other way that what we expect to get out of it. If we lose money because our expectations were wrong, then the disease is the cure. That is, we learn from that experience, and have a more realistic expectation next time.
I guess it's obvious that a "honest" company that actually produces and sells goods cannot compete with this.
Not to me. There are a lot of "honest" companies doing just fine whether on the stock market or not.
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The stock value of a company is tied to the analyst's expectations,
Analyst's?
In this particular case it's the speculators' tricks that cause this price.
These guys aren't in it for the (longer term) profits, they just want to make a quick buck on the hyped value.
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My surprise is simply, what makes anyone believe in IBM?
Stability. It's like Coca Cola or Procter&Gamble. No matter how bad the economy may be, no matter what businesses rise or fall, they'll still exist. These companies will survive virtually everything, they are big enough and diverse enough that a sudden shift in the economy might make them lose a few bucks, but it will never break them. Unlike a company that has a single product like, say, Facebook which is worthless should the social networking fad fizzle overnight.
And while, yes, MS is pretty big as we
Re:capitalism fail (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I don't see the fail.
The "proper" value of a stock is the net present value of its future dividend stream. Even for stocks that don't pay dividends, you can adjust the idea for increase in book value due to retained earnings. In either case, the value isn't just based on the most recent net revenue figures, it's based on profits, and on the anticipated future profits.
If you dig into these numbers a little more, they don't look all that unreasonable to me. Yeah, okay, IBM and Microsoft are neck-and-neck in market cap even though IBM has total revenues almost 50% higher than Microsoft, but Microsoft actually has greater profits ($19B vs $15B) which should send the cap the other way... except that IBM also has much greater assets. As far as their futures go, both companies are going to be productive and profitable both short-term and long-term, but it's unlikely that either of them is going to experience tremendous growth. So... they really are worth about the same.
Throwing Google into the mix, Google is worth almost as much as the other two, but has smaller revenues and profits ($8B)... so maybe that's the fail? Google also has tremendous opportunity for growth. It's currently raking in the lion's share of on-line advertising revenues in the industry, but those are still just a tiny piece of total advertising expenditures -- and online advertising continues to grow really quickly. Even if Google loses market share (and there isn't really any reason to think they will), the pie they're taking a share of is growing so fast that they have lots of growth ahead of them. And that assumes that none of Google's non-advertising ventures are successful. So, while Google currently has smaller revenues and profits, it also has much better prospects for growth than IBM or Microsoft. Again, I think the market capitalization isn't at all unreasonable.
But what about LinkedIn? Yeah, they may well represent a fail. But Lots of people said that about Google when their IPO went crazy. Investors in LinkedIn are gambling but it's not an entirely unreasonable gamble. LinkedIn doesn't have a lot of revenue, but they have demonstrated that they can generate income from their social network, and it's not unreasonable to believe that they'll find ways to generate a lot more. The bottom line with LinkedIn is that they currently have 100 million account holders. If they can find a way to extract $50 from each of them, on average, over the next 10-15 years they'll have justified their current market cap. That doesn't seem so far-fetched to me. It doesn't seem likely enough that I would buy their stock... but I also refused to buy Google for the same reasons.
Does the market mis-price companies at times? Absolutely. Especially when speculators start inflating bubbles. But I don't really see anything so insane here.
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It could be future earnings. It could also be the expectation that other investors are going to be willing to buy the stock for a higher price in future. I think most investing is based more on the latter and less on the former.
In the case of non-dividend stocks, it absolutely is the expectation that other investors are going to be willing to pay more in the future. That future willingness could be based on emotion or stupid decisions, or it could be based on an actual increase in the value of the company.
If I buy Apple stock, for example, (Apple, like many tech companies, doesn't pay dividends), I absolutely do expect to be able to sell that stock for a higher price in the future. Not because I'm betting that future investors
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The "proper" value of a stock is the net present value of its future dividend stream...
... which no one can possibly know, because of the "future" bit.
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Which no one can possibly know now, so they make bets with other people as to what it will be. Once the future comes, you can look back and see if your predictions were accurate.
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The "proper" value of a stock is the net present value of its future dividend stream...
... which no one can possibly know, because of the "future" bit.
Obviously no one can know, but it's possible to make a pretty good estimate for the near term. As you look further into the future the uncertainty increases... but as you look further into the future the effect of those profits on the net present value decreases. Bottom line, it is often possible to predict with surprising accuracy.
Keep in mind that this isn't some sort of newfangled idea. It's a necessary feature of any society above the hunter-gatherer level -- and even nomadic hunter-gatherers have
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>The "proper" value of a stock is the net present value of its future dividend stream.
Future dividend stream for how long?
And how do you calculate the net present value?
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Later in life I tried to tell myself that money isn't important, and blah blah blah. Then I got hungry. The hunger reminds me that something is real, and I can buy it with money.
Money will be real as long as people are willing to give you something for it.
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I wasn't exactly talking about money...
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A shared delusion isn't the same thing as something that's real. Millions of people believe in ghosts, souls, homeopathy etc. It doesn't make any of them real.
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Well at least someone seems to understand what I was getting at ;)
Re:capitalism fail (Score:5, Insightful)
It's insane because it's imaginary. It's an imaginary market and it's imaginary value. It's imaginary income. They are also imaginary dollars; imaginary worth imaginary costs. The WHOLE system is imaginary.
Obviously. But so what? What would be real? Gold? A system based on metals would be equally imaginary. The metals might be real, but their value is just as much a collective societal decision as our current approach of believing that audited bits in a computer have value.
The only system that would be truly "real" is barter, where goods with actual value to improve human life are exchanged for other actual goods. However, that system has such insanely high transaction costs that it's simply unworkable. If you're going to have trade, you need a common medium of exchange, and that medium is going to be arbitrary and, to use your word, "imaginary".
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Some will say that those players bring liquidity to the market, but I believe that liquidity in the market results in shareholders that care about "the quarter" and don't care about the future.
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Capitalism sucks because consumer protection sucks. Why is facebook worth so much? Because they've locked in all their users. Same with linkedin and twitter.
Imagine a telecom company locking in their users, so users would not be able to call eachother on different networks, or switch between networks. Now that would be an outrage.
Consider also a telecom company that sniffs the calls of its users and sells this information to other companies. That would be an even bigger outrage.
Why does it still work differ
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And once it is far behind and interests have been established, it is very difficult to fix the situation.
Not really. Many countries have gone from a monopoly telephone company to a plurality of telephone companies which allow users to call each other.
There's no reason why a social network can't be split up. It would require a standard to be established for interchange of status information etc. And legislation to make it happen.
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The point was that with telephone companies, consumer protection did not lag too much. Also, the technical obstacles were much lower.
Can you imagine facebook or twitter being forced to open up their API's so they can interoperate with other similar companies? I think they are too big already for that to happen. They have already acquired too much lobbying power. And they will use arguments of the kind "our API's are much too complicted to open up". Just like microsoft did with IE, saying that they could not
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it is founded on fraud, deception, and innuendo
Which is why the best stuff is rarely the most popular. Applies equally throughout life (music, for example).
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Facebook's valuation is based on demand from Goldman Sachs, whose business model is to use Federal "stimulus" money and to socialize losses - pray tell, how is that an example of capitalism?
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It's actually quite easy: The modern economy is a big game, and the score is measured in dollars. Anything else doesn't matter. Unemployed people only matter as far as they are a cost factor. As long as the extra win is larger than the extra cost they cause, they are acceptable. Oh, someone starves from our decisions? Does it cost us something? No? Well, then, don't worry. Our score is not affected. What, morality? Oh, I guess we can make a
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Wow, someone actually modded my post to 0? What, was it a Facebook fanboi?
Facebook Revenue (Score:5, Informative)
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It might be negligible for their market cap, but I'll gladly take the small change off their hands ;)
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It's Family Dollar. They do discount retail. Their market cap is $6.5 billion.
I haven't figured out how Facebook makes any money other than taking a cut on the sale of imagina
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$50 billion for Facebook? (Score:2)
Facebook claims they have 500 million users. That's $10 per user.
If I paid you $10, would you sign up for my new social networking site? We could do away with Facebook.
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Sign up, sure. But $10 wouldn't make me stop using Facebook in favour of your network. My family and friends and my photos are already on Facebook.
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Only if by "before that" you mean 1988, (the last time I was a teenager), since only teens use Myspace.
If I were Zuckerberg, I'd send a Christmas card to that Tom guy from Myspace every year for driving every adult with any evaluation skills at all away from Myspace and to Facebook.
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Actually, no. MySpace has a peak of 76M users. So 400M+ users on Facebook were never on MySpace. (Yes, there are multiple accounts, spammers, etc, but so there were in MySpace - I see no reason to assume the proportion is different).
As an anecdote, I know plenty of family members who were never in any social network (didn't even had IM accounts, just email) and are now on Facebook.
Negligible revenue (Score:4, Insightful)
1995 called; they want their bubble back.
It's all funny money. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a bit of belly button lint that is valued at over $900 nonillion dollars! That's more money than there is in the world, many times over! I would say her naval lint is priceless, but I may consider letting someone else farm my girlfriend's belly button, If they transfered the world's wealth to me, many times over (to have destroyed -- that shit's evil, and the world would just make more money).
Remember when Yahoo's stock value jumped because MS tried to buy them? Did you notice how much better Yahoo's service was during this time? Remember how their stock price fell drastically after the MS buy-out fell through? Remember how Yahoo's service just turned to utter shit at the same time? No? Right, because it stayed the same. These companies stock prices and Market Caps mean jack shit... it's all decimal numbers attached to feelings -- if more people feel good about having a larger number of a company's stock, then it's "worth" more, irregardless of the actual value of the products and services the companies make... It's all based on emotions! Feelings!!!
Now, say you're AT&T. Your stock price is worth X because of your profit and loss statement. If you spend some profit to make your company worth more -- improved speeds and reliability -- then your stock price will fall because the investors see that you are not bringing in as much profit.
Yes yes, there are Analysts, this is an over-simplification, the actual value does weigh in somewhat, but the feelings do more so -- This really does hold true in most cases. Ergo, one reason the US has shitty Internet is because of the funny-money market.
Granted, I feel that MS should be worth less than IBM, even though I haven't seen a single IBM brand device anywhere in my house for years... Even though I don't like or own Apple products, I feel that they should be worth more than MS because their fanbois are loud.
Is it any wonder that the feeling based values relate directly to the public's feelings and thus directly are reflected in the stock market?
How are you feeling about the banking/mortgage industry? About as well as they are doing, eh? Wonder why that is... It's a shame we didn't learn our lesson about the funny-money market the first time... I once showed that my neighbor has spent enough money playing the lottery to have purchased things they talk about buying if they win -- C'est la vie, people are dumb.
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- you swipe your CC at a store
- you reserve/buy an airline ticket (online or at the travel agent's)
- you look at a lot of airport departure boards
- you check in your baggage
- you wait for the traffic light(in densely populated areas)
- you turn on your XBox360, PlayStation or Nintendo console
- you do the most mundane things that you don't even think about
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It's as if they finally remembered that their name is International Business Machines!
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Would you consider your car's value in the second hand market to be "funny money"? That when suddenly our big SUV is a huge "gas guzzler" and everybody wants tiny hybrids instead that didn't change the value of your car even though it's the same? In case you didn't notice, the market is mostly driven what people want. To want is an emotion. Secondly they buy for the future, like how they think the oil prices will develop. That is belief. If sales are driven by emotions and beliefs, why would not stock price
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For a very well put together documentary on the irrational nature of economic value, watch this Nova episode, "Mind Over Money [pbs.org]". (sorry, US only...otherwise try bittorrent)
One of the funniest moments in the documentary occurs when otherwise intelligent economics students are caused to pay $28 for a twenty dollar bill. The experiment works by causing the losing bidder to forfeit his bid, not unlike the way real markets behave. The dominant economic models today assume that the consumer will rationally act
Back in the old days... (Score:3)
I remember when I was a retail software sales goon, going to an IBM presentation for their voice recognition software back in 1995. At the time there was a lot of big Windows 95 stuff going on and the IBM guy was really keen to make sure that people knew IBM was a "real" computer company, and one thing that has always stuck with me was him saying that IBM was the biggest company in that market, and if was so big that if you took the next three companies and added their value together - IBM was still worth more.
Never found out of that was exactly true, but at the time I remember it put IBM in a new perspective for me - I just knew them as a company that made a bunch of weeny boring unpopular PC software packages and did some stuff in the hardware space. The reality seems to be that they're this big, massively entrenched company that has hooks freakin' everywhere.
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Do you have to be REALLY old... (Score:5, Interesting)
... to read the headline as "...IBM's market cap has once again surpassed Microsoft's..."?
Don't forget that IBM was a $70 billion turnover company (back when that was worth quite a lot) whose chairman regularly appeared at the shareholders' meeting and apologized for any inadvertent growth during the past year? That was because everyone knew if IBM grew any bigger the DoJ was committed to dismembering it as a monopoly.
At that point, there was no Microsoft.
IBM basically created Microsoft as a defence against the mortal strategic threat posed to it by the Apple Lisa. Yes, that's right: to protect itself against an utterly imaginary threat, IBM itself created the only serious competitor it would have for the next 30 years. Hmmm, maybe not as dumb as you might think... at least it got the DoJ off its back and onto Microsoft's...
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IBM created Microsoft? Ha! I guess you don't know many IBMers from back in the day.
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IBM created Microsoft? Ha! I guess you don't know many IBMers from back in the day.
Yes, IBM created Microsoft. Had IBM opted to write its own operating system for the PC, or even just bought MS-DOS outright rather than licensing it, Microsoft would never have existed (the company would have, but it would never have grown the way it did).
And, yes, I know IBMers from back in the day. I didn't become an IBMer until 1997 so I wasn't there personally, but over 14 years in the company I've met plenty who were.
Facebook? (Score:3)
His story (Score:2)
Waiting in the wings is Facebook, which has been valued in the private market for as much as $50 billion, on negligible revenue
Gee, where have I heard that one before? I forget. Nevermind. BUY BUY BUY!!!
So in other words (Score:2)
You mean (Score:3)
IBM is once again, Officially Worth More Than Microsoft.
Balmer is killing MS, and it's because he is too busy chasing shinys.
Re:First post (Score:5, Interesting)
First post - IBM ahead of MS? Big suprise considering OS/2 was such a flop in later years :p
Which is too bad, since OS/2 was vastly superior to Windows at the time. So much so, that OS/2 was the OS of choice in many applications where stability and security was important, such as ATMs.
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Yet OS/2 was quite superior to the versions of Windows that Microsoft had out at the time.
In any event, IBM and Microsoft generally work in different areas now -- considering how IBM has their fingers in everything there's considerable overlap, but for the most part they're very different.
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I think IBM software is generally crappy and rushed, look at Lotus Notes. How can anyone pay for that monstrosity? Hardware, that's a different story.
I think IBM has a ridiculously large sales and marketing department so they can trick IT managers into getting insane contracts and deals. They do produce nice guides on developer works though.
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I find it hard to believe it's superior to anything, ever.
It's slow, heavyweight and awkward, at everything it does. As a client it's far, far too thick. It pains me to say it but the modern world of browser-based applications, Lotus Notes is a dinosaur. And not a cool one like a raptor.
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Notes is a dogs breakfast of utter shyte with exotic commands to do what should be simple functions.
While this is true, it doesn't contradict anything he said.
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the overlap - I read about guys from IBM's consulting arm talking about Microsoft consulting. They said if they and guys from MS ever turned up to the same meeting, they knew one of them had come to the wrong place.
The implication was that IBM only does the biggest customers that Microsoft simply can't handle. It makes sense to me, IBM was repositioned as a serious business consultancy, Microsoft is just a 2-bit technology player (and that technology is 20 years old)
Re:First post (Score:5, Insightful)
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)...
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MacOS 7.x to 9.x was *not* superior to NT.
Possibly, in features and power, not in usability. In any case, NT was pretty much only used on servers and hardcore geeks, not average desktops. (And I use Win2k, which is just an upgrade of NT, so I like it myself.)
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Untrue. The technical inferiority of classic MacOS was a real, quantifiable usability problem at times, and the UI never really was all that much better than the one found in Windows 95. Hell, even Steve Jobs knew it had to be replaced.
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Macs offered multitasking since 1987, with the introduction of MultiFinder [wikipedia.org]. You are correct about memory protection though.
I'd have to say 7 was superior to NT 3.5, but once 4.0 came out, NT/2k lead the way until OS X.
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He's talking about preemptive multitasking which Macs didn't offer.
A/UX. Way before NT.
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OS/2 2.0 offered all these "modern things" you're talking about back when Windows 3.0 was the newest that Microsoft had out, and MacOS was far behind as well.
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Correction ... Windows 3.1 came out at the same time as OS/2 2.0.
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lets say I want to open some stuffit files...
You're comparing Stuffit and Winzip. Those are apps, not OS components. And Stuffit is a proprietary format, so there wasn't an alternative (that I recall). I'm sure you could find some annoying Windows archivers.
I used ZipIt on Mac, seemed pretty simple.
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Re:Name for DotCom bubble 2.0? (Score:5, Interesting)
How about 'Social Bubble', it sounds friendly too :-)
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I'm sure most of us have cut a fart while sitting in a pool or a hot tub or a bath. Urban dictionary calls it an aqua fart [urbandictionary.com], though I've never heard it called anything. Anyhow, when you do it in a hot tub, the heat and chlorine and ass gas combine to form a truly retched stench that lingers.
That's the face book bubble.
Re:Name for DotCom bubble 2.0? (Score:4, Interesting)
Facebook, damn that was sooo 2011! The "hard on" the Social Network movie has given the geek world today will eventually go limp. I'd say around the time MS does what it does best. Fuck all their partners when they least expect it, steal a sizable marketshare and borgify the general population.
They sink 240 mil into FB (salting its company value) and then FB lets MS implant their spies throughout the office, setup exclusive ad deals, and put a like button on Bing. Zuckerberg whose supposed to be this visionary doesn't even it coming.
- Take Nokia and factor in Skype. MS has made cell phone carriers obsolete.
- Take Skype and link it with MSN and Hotmail, build a FB import tool (which they could do in house). MS has made FaceBook obsolete.
- Take XBOX, Kinect, link it with PayTV, Skype and BlueRay. MS has just created an all in one black box that does everything for the home.
The history of the IT industry is about to repeat itself. Sell your shares in Apple if you've still gottem.
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Why would anyone wanna fix Microsoft ?
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Fix as in neuter, I suppose.
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there's 2 things to this that will make you realise why Ballmer hasn't gone despite being so f**** useless.
1. He and his buddy Bill Gates own about 10% of the total shares in MS. (or that might be 10% each, I forget and don't care too much anyway)
2. He has controlled his staff - though Scott Guthrie left of his own accord, Bob Muglia was told to pack his bags, basically for being too good (he took the services and tools division from nothing to be the 3rd biggest revenue stream at MS). So obviously if you d
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All in all, there would have to be an almighty cock-up to get rid of him. Like, say another vastly overpaid acquisition. There are 8.5b reasons why he should go today, but.. guess what BillG steps in and says the takeover of Skype was all his idea.
Aside from the Skype acquisition, Ballmer has also presided over Vista, the repeated failure of MSN Search/Windows Live Search to gain any market share (Bing is doing better, but is still an extremely distant follower of Google), the Zune media player (about 2% market share, last I heard), the Kin phones (hohoho), being generally wrong-footed once again with Tablet PCs, losing the "biggest tech company" title (to Apple, of all people)...
I know Bill has to take some of the blame for the earlier ones, but Ste
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And perception is money.
Not max $1 (Score:2)
P/E is a backwards number. In your example, Apple earned $1 last year - but that is not what it's going to earn next year.
P/E is a way to compare two different companies quickly. For example, a company with 1,000 shares at $10 to a company with 100 share at $100 that made the same profit would have the same P/E ratio. One can compare Berkshire Hathaway ($118,045 per share) with Microsoft ($24).
A better example may be to compare IBM, Google and Ford to get a better idea of how these things work. In some way
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Pretty much. So I wonder when IBM is going to come out with their Superbowl commercial depicting Apple as Big Brother and IBM as the one setting the masses free?
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I wonder when IBM is going to come out with their Superbowl commercial depicting Apple as Big Brother and IBM as the one setting the masses free?
These are a little bit in that vein.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xw2um_another-ibm-red-hat-linux-advertise_shortfilms [dailymotion.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJA9eiUktcA [youtube.com]
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