Apple Most Valuable Tech Company By $100 Billion; Google Closing In On Microsoft | Hacker News Reader

Apple Most Valuable Tech Company By $100 Billion; Google Closing In On Microsoft

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26 pointsfosk21 comments

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...

Throwing in HP/IBM on the revenue and employee details would have been nice. Still - nice article.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Actually, the Mac has "outgrown the PC (and hence has gained share) for 19 quarters straight, nearly five years." [1]

And that's not taking into account the iPad, which arguably has been cannibalizing sales of netbooks.

[1] http://www.asymco.com/2011/01/24/how-does-the-mac-gain-share...

IOS made great inroads in the enterprise environment, The Iphone is immensely popular, and rightly so, the Ipad is gaining ground as well.

Where inroads are stymied is in the desktop platform - OSX. the Reasons for this can be debated on their merits, But usually this discussion degenerates into a flame war very fast.

I will however volunteer that my current work environment was OSX dominated, and I ventured to keep it so. However, after working in this environment for a while, I made a decision to switch to Windows (windows XP initially, now 7) for the entire organization. using OSX was just untenable for our business practices and environment.

Kept the hardware though, and still buy Apple hardware as replacement, it just doesn't run OSX, which is sacrilegious in some circles.

Why would you buy Apple hardware if you don't plan on running OS X? This seems frivolous, especially in a business setting.

The allinone package that Apple provides (the imac) is easy to maintain, and get support for when required, we need a compact platform due to space constraints, and other allinones are not much cheaper. Apart from a good online support network, I also can waltz down the street if the problem is urgent enough, this cannot be overstated.

Drivers for the hardware provided by Apple are always a single package making deployment easy, what's more they update cautiously, and updates are easy to deploy, that just isn't the case with many other providers.

The possibility of Installing OSX IF required, is also appealing, and no other hardware vendor offers that, and it happens on occasion.

There is an aesthetic appeal to the machine itself that is hard to deny, Some may question the validity of such frivolity, but in my view, thinking that is selling your coworkers short, aesthetics are important in the work place.

We do that too. The new MacBook Air has replaced the Dell E4200 as our default notebook for Windows 7. It's similarly priced, even with Windows, and it has a lower defect rate, a much lower incidence of damage (metal vs plastic, mainly), and users like it more.

"using OSX was just untenable for our business practices and environment.”

Please explain.

Despite working in various IT and coding positions for the past few years I’ve always gotten this oblique and infuriating answer. Generally it’s due to networks that are ghosted (there are custom rsync solutions) but I’ve seen more than one business stuck on XP and IE6 because of some jackass who programmed the business systems in VB and didn’t leave source.

Personally, I’m convinced that because of Android and iOS’s rise—the uptake of personal-favorite platforms in business—it’s no longer smart to build a network around a single OS, in that workers do want to use their platform of choice. The best workers will resent you based on this (and possibly leave), whether they hate having to use Windows or Mac, iPhone or Android. (The last two especially, I’m friends with IT people who hate iOS and implemented an Android-only policy, while knowing the other side: the workers who prefer iOS and have to deal with my friends’ jackassery.)

Surely you do realize that the the constant use of computers in a work place is not reserved for IT professionals alone.

It may be true that some piece of software is programmed for exclusive and specific OS use that is critical for the day to day operation and locks you to a vendor or OS. But it is usually not developed in house, nor does the organization can (or even should, if its not its competency or mission) develop an alternative software to supplant it. Developing complex software costs allot of money, not every organization can do this.

Put simply, Jackass.Corp makes niche software that runs only on windows, or only on OSX (finalcut pro comes to mind for instance) but there is often no alternative at all or a very poor substitute virtually unknown to current and potential staff. What would be a pragmatic choice?

In Addition and to its credit. Technologies like Active directory /group policy are far more mature and fine grained then what is currently offered by Apple (including custom rsync solutions) this has just been a focus of the work Microsoft did in the last 10 years. This is no small issue as it saves allot of time, and lower costs for the support team operations.

To some extent Apple has recognized this themselves, and have abandoned the server platform, it was increasingly a ridiculous proposition to maintain OSX servers (not to mention costly) when every other server platform we had became virtualized and hardware independent (again talking about a JackAss.corp that just ignored the changes of the time)

Where i would agree with you is that the most viable alternative going forward is to implement new applications that are browser based, then it wouldn't matter what OS it runs on that much, so it will be either thin clients, or whoever offers the cheapest license. and in my case, again, Microsoft offered far cheaper licensing price per machine. Personally my measure point is Firefox compatibility and Chrome. Not IE and for that matter not safari either. but we are long way away from having enterprise business that runs entirely through a browser windows.

Banning software or hardware use based on mere preference is wrongheaded, in my case we don't ban any cellular technology, but discourage blackberries (because of their infuriating reliance on the BIS server hosted in house or at your cell provider, and tends to break whenever you patch your mail server system). there is a contingent of blackberry users religiously devoted to their devices, we explain that the efforts on our behalf to maintain their preference prevents us from doing other things, hopefully in time, this will sink in, either that, or the cost to our time will become too much, We would rather study how to support and deal with IOS and android bugs then keep polished skills on increasingly irrelevant platform (in our context that is).

Outside of myopic world of Tech, most people will not leave a position due to the choice of OS, this type zealotry is usually reserved for geeks that do computing for a living not as a mean for some other goal (say organize a massive street festival).

something that is easy to forget, is that outside of just mere preference, there is an issue of competency, a user may prefer a certain system, but he/she isn't always competent enough to fix a problem when it surfaces (and why should she, fixing a problem after all... isn't her job or interest). There is also the user who has a preference to an antiquated, even obsolete piece of software, moving them away from a system they feel competent in to something newer is often painful, this, by the way, is not exclusive to any OS.

By the way, as a sidenote, in an attempt to avoid changing OS for staff if they didnt want but still maintain access to software they had to, but couldn't use, we tried virtual desktops, (ala parallels, vmware etc) It was a disaster, your average user just couldn't deal with it, frequent crashes, slowdowns and panic cries to the helpdesk. After we moved away from this scenario we ware able to save a staggering amount of our operation costs and funnel it towards development (which we did not have before).

perhaps all this software is boring for the startup mindset to develop, its a pity cause there is a gaping need for innovation in this arena that is left virtually unattended to, and its not just because of some IT manager reticence (IT managers often like the newest gadgets and OS too) Its because it is not created, people are hell bent on building the next spacefacetwatcloud that generates revenue from a new advertisement selling paradigm instead of moving the bigger org into a new age.

I hope this long winded reply, explains a little.

Thanks for your response. You're probably right about nobody except zealots quitting due to OS use. I've seen a couple of people throw shit-fits about having to use a Mac, and they've always been programmers.

If there's a key piece of software that is tied to one OS, the worker is understandably tied to that OS, in my XP-only organization, we've got 6 mac users using FCP. However, the big issue with this is the reduction in worker autonomy. It's fine to have a baseline situation, but no flexibility (which you seem to provide to your clients) create a hellish situation for technical users who understand their system.

Maybe that's the big thing to look for in a job moving forward: tool choice and autonomy.

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.

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.

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.

Not only are other laptops so expensive that Apple's markup no longer looks absurd, but business travelers also have the benefit of spending someone else's money.

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

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

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.

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