What Happens When Apple Passes Microsoft In Value? Yes, When. | Hacker News Reader

What Happens When Apple Passes Microsoft In Value? Yes, When.

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19 pointswheels23 comments

This comes up a lot but it always misses one aspect of this. Microsoft has returned many many billions to shareholders and continues to do so with a quarterly dividend. When they started along this dividend path they made a large special dividend payment to shareholders. This makes these kinds of comparisons very difficult and of questionable meaning. One of the reasons companies like Apple don't want to pay out a dividend is that keeping the money in the bank drives up the stock price. A business with 1 dollar in sales is worth X. A business with 1 dollar in sales and 1 dollar in the bank is worth X + 1. This simple effect makes it easier for the stock to climb and options of executives to be more valuable. It does not necessarily make the business any better especially after a certain point when there's enough money to withstand downturns. This is why market caps are a not a good way to compare businesses. You can consider things like return on assets, net profit margins etc. and see if those feel like better measures of the quality of a business. After a certain market cap, I think it's more correct to look at a business as large or large enough rather than an important measure of something.

You don't really have to pay a dividend when you're stock is rising like Apple's is on growth. It's a fairly new thing for MS to pay one too and it's only because the growth ended. Since MSFT started issuing a dividend, Apple's stock has gone up over 1000% the dividend doesn't compare.

Correct, because stocks are a thing in themselves and not something related to the actual or expected value of the company.

Microsoft stumbled into riding a thriving software ecosystem with MSDOS and IBM PCs. They were able to leverage that into another thriving ecosystem with Windows. They did the same with the XBox.

A lot of Microsoft's recent attempts in the mobile world have fizzled. Apple understands such ecosystems, however. WinPho 7 will succeed or fail based on whether or not they get their ecosystem right.

What most people don't realize is that while Apple claims to be a mobile device company, the truth is that Apple is really a mobile ecosystem company.

It's the ecosystem which is the key! The seamless iTunes/iPod experience was built on the foundation of a workable, legal, profitable music download ecosystem. Apple then leveraged this into the iTunes/AppStore/iPhone mobile device ecosystem.

Remember the lessons of the iPod. Lots of people made mp3 players with more/better stats and features. But no one else had the ecosystem on which to base a smooth and seamless experience. (And the marketing to not only bring it to our attention, but make it hip.) Right now, lots of people are making phones that can do more than the iPhone, but once again it's not the device, it's the ecosystem. And as heavy-handed as Apple may be, they're still at least twice as good as any of their rivals. The carriers are suffocating the gosling that will grow up to lay the golden eggs. Apple is feeding theirs enough so it will grow up marginally healthy. That's why they're winning.

(Palm understood this, but by trying to sync through iTunes, they put Apple in the position to sabotage their ecosystem. Bad move.)

EDIT: Suspect I am being punitively downmodded by someone whose post I criticized.

I agree - Apple has a tendency to create good devices and then services around the devices.

iPod:iTurnes iPhone:App Store

These services are great because they act as monopolies: "You want to make something for the device? You have to sell it in our store where we take a cut."

So far this has worked quite well and I imagine the returns on capital are huge.

Apple's elephant in the room is Steve Jobs. He's undoubtedly one of the greatest, if not the greatest business leader of the twentieth century, and a lot of Apple's fortunes can directly be ascribed to him being at the helm of the company.

It's uncertain what will happen when he passes the torch along, voluntarily or otherwise. There are ongoing concerns about his health, he has had a liver transplant, he's had cancer and as Wikipedia states: On January 14, 2009, in an internal Apple memo, Jobs wrote that in the previous week he had "learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought" and announced a six-month leave of absence until the end of June 2009 to allow him to better focus on his health. [1]

As the Sculley period shows Apple without Steve Jobs might not do as well. He's truly one in a million, and a lot of the company's fortune has his signature on it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Health_concerns

Agreed on all points. I suspect the problem is that characters such as Gates and Jobs, who are focused visionaries don't leave much room in the highest ranks for people like themselves. To put in another way, put two Steve Jobs' in one room, and only one will leave.

So the people who excel in companies like Microsoft and Apple can't be the same kind of uncompromising visionaries like Jobs and Steve, they are almost by definition the best #2 guys in the industry.

I expect that Apple will slowly turn into Ballmer-era Microsoft. Profits will climb for a while, but the new leader won't likely have the guts to attack new markets and develop revolutionary products. For if the executive did want to do those things, he would have started his own company 20 years ago.

I am not really an Apple hater or fan and the only thing I would miss if Apple went down would be Mac OS X. I know Darwin is open source but what makes Mac OS X awesome is the GUI + Darwin.

Do you think that Apple would have survived without the "Sculley period"?

What happens? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

What happens to the companies themselves? Nothing.

What happens to perceptions? Probably something.

There's always mistrust of the biggest player. If Apple become's the most valuable technology company in the world, their propensity to control their stack will be even more a focus for the media.

I think Microsoft will relish being an underdog for a change: "Clearly we're not a monopoly. We're not even the biggest technology company in the world."

Even if both companies change nothing, they will be seen differently.

I'm not so sure about this -- it would only play out this way if people's perception of size were based on the company's size, rather than their exposure to the company.

For one example: one of my business clients has a couple of die-hard Mac users (who I'm happy to support), and the administrator there is one of those "bah, Macs are toys, why don't they just get a PC like everyone else?" idiots. I mentioned to him one day that Apple had enough cash in the bank to purchase Dell outright. However, this did not at all change his perception of Apple.

It doesn't help that many individuals' exposure to Apple right now is through consumer devices like the iPhone and iPod, and not so much through "serious" computers.

Oh, and also: software. I'd hazard a guess that most of my clients don't think of the stuff on their iPhone as software in the sense of "stuff that runs on a computer". I suspect that they think of it more as "features", so for them, the only Apple software that they know of is iTunes.

Cisco held the title of "world's most valuable company" at one point during the bubble (see http://news.cnet.com/2100-1033-238483.html - March 27, 2000).

That proved pretty meaningless then, as it would for Apple now.

Market cap is not a good basis upon which a company should frame its strategic planning and for the article to suggest that Microsoft may do this vis-a-vis Apple and Google renders its analysis pretty superficial.

Good point. Volkswagen did as well, during the kerfuffle with Porsche in 2008:

http://www.autoblog.com/2008/10/28/volkswagen-temporarily-be...

Apple still has to contend with Nokia for the largest mobile computing firm slot, as far as it concerns mobile phones. Granted, Apple has the larger profit because of its iTunes/Apps ecosystem which enables the iPhone, but Nokia still has the larger sales numbers and is working hard to build its ecosytem with its new Maemo OS. I also find WinPhone 7's concept of ''hubs'' radically innovative and superior to the the apps concept. In other words, no one is sitting still...

I find one thing a bit unbelievable. The author says Chrome OS is meant to kill Windows. I don't believe Chrome OS is meant to kill Windows...From what I read it is more of a new style of platform developed for Netbooks and less powerful devices. There is no way that something like that could kill Windows in my opinion. Aside from that, I really don't believe the anything happens when Apple passes Microsoft. Some of Microsoft's bigger innovations aren't out yet, such as their new Mobile 7 phones and even Project Natal, which comes out for Xbox 360 later this year and could give Microsoft a big Holiday stock push.

I would suggest reading innovators dilemma, todays "less powerful devices" can very quickly become what everyone is using tomorrow.

It's more likely that Windows, when it finally does die, won't die because of a single product like Chrome. Rather it will die slowly of a thousand cuts.

I realized the headline "question" is just rhetorical and fashioned to be link-bait, but can't resist offering an answer of: "Nothing."

...because this is not the long-dreamed-about NCAA national football title.

It's not about titles. Or even dollar totals. Whether Apple as a country can continue to offer great value to its shareholders (wish I were one) depends on its long-term business model (and ability to judge consumer tastes/desires). And they certainly could potentially make some strategic missteps like any huge corporation (can you say, 'Toyota'?).

More interesting than Apple teaming up with MSFT at this point would be Apple moving into Google's turf: search.

What if Apple bought up DuckDuckGo and invested as much innovative energy there as it has in hard/software? It's sounding likely that they'll soon be launching iAd to compete with other online ad processes. They're already getting practice at building huge server farms (Maiden, NC).

I wouldn't rule out Ads/Search from Apple: it would just require getting ratcheted higher up on Steve's priorities.

The fact that a single person can create a Google competitor indicates this is something that Apple might not want to get into.

Just because a product can be replicated by a single person doesn't make them competitive in any way. I don't think that is a valid concern.

Also, by your very argument, Google might not have wanted to get into search either. But of course, anyone would laugh at such a statement.

Just because a product can be replicated by a single person doesn't make them competitive in any way. I don't think that is a valid concern.

It's not a concern. That was never my position. What it does tell us is that search at that level is becoming a commodity.

The Google ecosystem as a whole, on the other hand, is not a commodity. That is the competition Apple needs to be concerned about.

Also, by your very argument, Google might not have wanted to get into search either. But of course, anyone would laugh at such a statement.

Just because you weren't able to synthesize the facts into something more than a straw man, don't assume that it's not possible. Sergey and Brin were pioneers, so of course it's not commodity when they did it. I think the case is strong that it is now.

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