Tech Triumph: How Apple Beat Microsoft

Apple Inc now lead Microsoft in market value, the tech company finished last quarter with a market value of $222.07bn, compared to a measly $219bn for Microsoft. The news comes after the stock market closed with Apple shares down 0.45% but Microsoft down by 4.07%.

Oil giants ExxonMobil were the only company to beat the Californian tech giant with a $278.64bn market value. To buy a share in Apple would now cost you 10 times what it would have a decade ago, just a year before new boss Steve Jobs launched a series of revolutionary products including the most iconic product of the 21st century, the iPod.

However, this is not the first time Apple been worth more than Microsoft, in December 1989 they briefly overtook them. The company whose operating system runs on more than 90% of the world’s computers has never been able to match the growth rates it experienced in the 1990s. Contrary to Apple, Microsoft stock has decreased by 20% in ten years.

Microsoft still have their fingers in the pie of success however as they invested $150m into Apple in 1997 to keep them afloat, at the time Gates’ company was worth more than five times that of Jobs. Although they are valued higher, Apple are still beaten by Microsoft in sales, in the last quarter, Microsoft reported $14.5bn revenue compared to Apple’s $13.5bn. Apple only recently surpassed Walmart in market value to become the 3rd largest company in the world.

These results, putting a tech company just below an Oil giant, the leader in an industry that has all but ruled the world for the last fifty years shows a fundamental change in society. Consumer electronics, software and technology are almost more valuable than the fuel that arguably supports our way of life.

It will be interesting to watch the trends in the next decade to see how things pan out, some companies are reaching unprecedented value with little or no physical output, Google for example, is one of the most powerful companies in the world, not just because of their net worth, but their undeniable control over the internet and potential to do so much more. Facebook has been about only 6 years, its founder and CEO is barely out of University yet his company now has an estimated value of $20bn. Perhaps the number one company in 10 years time has not even been founded yet.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 29th, 2010 at 8:52 am and is filed under iPods. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.