

Apple Most Valuable Tech Company By $100 Billion; Google Closing In On Microsoft - fosk
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/14/apple-eats-microsoft/

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mrkurt
Not to promote my employer (I'm a lame duck there anyway), but we just ran a
related and useful article about valuing companies. It explains why market cap
is... odd and gives some other metrics that may be more relevant:
[http://arstechnica.com/apple/guides/2011/02/does-this-
metric...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/guides/2011/02/does-this-metric-make-
my-company-look-big.ars)

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jakarta
Not to be offensive, but I don't think these other measures are very
insightful.

Measures like EV and assets dont really tell you much because they are easy to
get skewed by leverage. The cash measure isn't great either because it's
dominated by financials (where the cash does not necessarily belong to the
bank). You see this as you go through the lists and notice different lists are
dominated by certain types of companies.

Market cap is actually a decent proxy here, just to see what the market
'perceives' the value of companies to be.

If you were comparing large tech companies, a figure like FCF/EV might be
interesting to see which company is yielding the most cashflow.

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mrphoebs
What would happen to apple stock if steve's health takes a turn for the worse?
I think no other tech giant's leadership (since bill gates and microsoft in
the late 80's and early 90's) has been perceived even by the general public as
being so pivotal to a company's vision and dominance?

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sinzone
For sure it will have strong implications in the short term. But in the long
term it will depend on board of directors, shareholder, new CEO, new vision
etc. Look at IBM, is 100 years in business, Apple could stay in business for
many years to come, with or without Steve, the hard thing is to find a
remarkable CEO that can drive the company to a clear path.

"Founders leaving" has been always an hard question/answer to say in the short
term.

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Tycho
I just wish Mac OS was making similar inroads against Windows. Although I
guess that's not the be-all-and-end-all it used to be. And I was astonished to
see in the library the other day, over 50% of the laptops people had were
Macs, plus other folk there with iPads.

~~~
ghshephard
While PCs may out-number in sales - I was somewhat taken aback when returning
to SFO from LAX (Gate 70B) on Saturday night. There were 14 Macintoshes, of
one form or another, 4 iPads (mine was one), 3 Kindles (that I could find),
and I don't even want to guess how many iPhones. There were what appeared to
be two netbooks of some form, and I _think_ a thinkpad.

Now, those saturday night returnees may be a somewhat biased group of people
(I was returning from vacation, Kauai) - but still, it was a little
astonishing to see how many people were using their Macs in public.

I wonder if anyone has done a survey of _what Laptops people are using_, as
opposed to what Laptops are being purchased.

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mikeklaas
Do you really think that 80% of windows laptops are simply being unused?

It's pretty clear that apple has a majority market share among young urbanites
in certain cities. Most cafés around here (vancouver) have a reliable 80%
macintosh laptop rate, from my informal experience. It doesn't surprise me
that a saturday-night flight inbound to san fran looks similar.

Don't underestimate selection bias.

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Tycho
I suppose another possibility is that users don't replace Macs as often as
they do PCs. Which would lead to a disparity between sales figures and actual
usage.

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spenrose
Felix Salmon argues that the stock market disconnected from the real economy
some time ago; I think he's right:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/opinion/14Salmon.html>

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InclinedPlane
It's funny how people can take a number tied rather abstractly to an
enormously volatile and effervescent measure so seriously.

~~~
mkramlich
Agreed. But in this case, Apple really has been kicking ass in the product
department for the last few years. They are on a roll. They must be doing
something right. And as long as the fundamental causes behind their ability to
execute continue to hold true, the market expects them to continue hitting it
out of the park. Whether that will happen or not, nobody can know. But in a
bet between evidence versus speculation, my money is on evidence.

