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Comment by martythemaniak | Hacker News Reader

That's rather meaningless, but its interesting to compare the competitors there: Apple, RIM and Nokia.

Apple and RIM seem to be on par - Apple is valued at ~2x compared to RIM, but then its also much bigger company (in terms of revenues, employees, products, operations etc).

Nokia seems a bit weak in this light - they're a behemoth in the cell phone market and yet they operate on much thinner margins and aren't valued that high.

Anyway, I am still kicking myself for not buying RIM stock when I was beta testing the original Pearl. Back then I had a hunch they were undervalued and a septupling of the stock price would have done me well ;)

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RIM still might be a good buy. As consumers awaken to smartphones, they're probably going to be a top 3 player, possibly even #1. While Apple is clearly the hype winner, RIM is making phones that a lot more people love.

Company valuations are growth bets. Nokia is already holds a huge share of an almost-saturated industry. There isn't much room for growth in their core business area, and they don't have a history of growing into new areas of revenue like some of the other companies on the list (Google and Apple especially).

FWIW, Apple and Google are both overvalued. :)

[edit: I should say technology company valuations are growth bets. Corporations in stable industries are more often valued by earnings, unless something weird is going on (acquisition talk, etc...).]

   FWIW, Apple and Google are both overvalued. :)

Well as you said: 'growth bets'.

Google are a long bet, I reckon. So far they're proven for putting out good products. But to be worth the money they need to monetise at least some of these. Up to now we have one success in that department: Adwords, which is extremely well thought out. But it's still just one point. They may not get another multi-$b cow. Adwords even if they manage to fix content ads, would be pressed to find that much growth (but 100%-200% is not out of the question)

Apple may be justified. There is the old mantra of 'be very good at 2 things' instead of 'be the best at 1 thing.' Apple can do:

1- Software

2- Hardware

3- Marketing / Product Launches

4- Creating Markets & doing deals that put a nice chunk of it in their pockets (Itunes, App store)

Take any 2 and you have a potential player in a lot of markets theat may grow very big.

- TVish markets (some future apple TV?)

- bookish markets (Kindle?)

- thin clients (If the free with internet accesss PCs happen, who better then apple to make them? Nokia?)

- gaming (could happen?)

- GPSish markets (you never know where this might go)

- In-Vehicle stuff (Ipod type thing for music & aircon & stuff in your new BMW?)

You almost expect apple to grab a piece of any consumer electronics that come up. Problem is they seem to be running on momentum. Not sure that'll last forever.

To add to that: How many of http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html could be cracked by Apple?

I think 1, 2, 17, 27, they do, probably will do or are uniquely positioned to do.

They could have as good a crack as any another half dozen.

Come to think of it: "17. New payment methods" might be one for Google. I mean, the key(s) seem like they might be around millions of users with accounts & easy, frictionless interface. Google checkout's not really changing the word though.

It'll take a lot to beat eBay (who owns PayPal) in this space.

> "key(s) seem like they might be around millions of users with accounts & easy, frictionless interface"

Fwiw, Yahoo & Microsoft both have way more users than Google. But Google probably has most of the early-adopter crowd.

Users was probably the wrong term. I meant 'accounts'.

That's what I meant. There are actually more Yahoo! accounts and Live accounts than GMail accounts.

>and they don't have a history of growing into new areas of revenue

Depends how far back you look. Nokia used to make rubber boots.

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